


in the after days

by friendlystrawberry



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Ba Sing Se, Friends to Strangers to Friends to Lovers, Grappling with Racism Classism and Imperialism in One Convenient Fic, Happy Ending, Heartache, M/M, Order of the White Lotus, Poetry, Post-Canon, Slow Burn, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-17
Updated: 2020-12-18
Packaged: 2021-03-10 02:08:51
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 27,880
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27606074
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/friendlystrawberry/pseuds/friendlystrawberry
Summary: Seven years after the Great War, Sokka finds himself in Ba Sing Se following a devastating breakup. It’s the perfect place to start fresh, except the Fire Lord is there too, stealing his (gloomy) thunder and outshining him in every way.///He doesn’t have the time to be mad about it when they discover an international conspiracy to topple the stability of the four nations.
Relationships: Sokka/Zuko (Avatar)
Comments: 80
Kudos: 276





	1. Chapter 1

Sokka was falling-down drunk in a nameless Earth Kingdom village when he recieved the letter from Iroh. It arrived on the back of a messenger hawk that dive-bombed through the open window of the smoky bar, shredding the bandages wrapped around his arms and raking deep scratches into his skin. He barely noticed, ten shots of baijiu deep. He had just finished his impromptu poetry recital for the night and was preoccupied with methodically making his way through the pungent alcohol in the ceramic decanter at his table.

His fingers were so strangely unwieldy, so disobediently drunk that he could barely unscrew the top of the message canister on the hawk’s back and retrieve the scroll. The faceless woman sharing the table with him had to help him pluck the paper out of the canister, as Sokka’s hand-eye coordination deserted him halfway through the endeavor. The bird immediately scored seven more gashes into his arm and beat him violently over the head with its wings as it flapped away through the same window it had used to enter.

Sokka took a few moments to process the scroll in his hands. He’d never really been on letter-writing terms with the Dragon of the West, and he was not expecting a bird to mutilate his upper right arm that night. Though he was a deep skeptic at heart — Suki had called him paranoid, but that just wasn’t true, he was just careful — and would be suspicious in any other circumstance, Sokka’s drunken brain took the sudden appearance of the letter at face value.

The message itself was short and deeply odd, written in elegant, generously full brushstrokes on pebbled mulberry paper. 

_Dear Sokka,_

_Piandao tells me you are a very promising young man recently freed of any obligations, living a fantastical life as a wandering poet. You may not wish to hear advice from an old man like me, but allow me to humor myself. An earthquake may alter the face of the earth, but sometimes it will bring hidden and delightful treasures to the surface. It may take some time for the landscape to heal, but if you remember to search for it, you may find something more precious than what you lost in the quake._

_I would love to see you in Ba Sing Se, perhaps hear of your travels and enjoy some readings of your poetry. There’s a room at my house and a job at the Jasmine Dragon for you whenever you like._

_Iroh_

He vaguely remembered sending a letter to Piandao weeks ago, during one of his drunken stupors. The last two months had been blacked-out haze after blacked-out haze. He’s not sure what he wrote on it, only that it had mostly been drunken poetry. Poetry about wine, about his lost youth, and about Suki’s eyes, her laugh, her dizzyingly magnetic pull on him. But mostly about wine. He couldn’t handle anything other than being happily, pleasantly drunk.

(Piandao had sent a terse response, best captured in the first line of his letter: _Sokka, your brushwork is in shambles._ He didn’t need to put the real meaning of his words in his writing. Sokka knew what he meant.)

“Freed of any obligations.” Iroh had chosen such a mild way to say that his life was over, and that he would never find true happiness in anything again. And his fantastical life wasn’t all that fantastical, to be honest. It consisted mostly of wandering the outskirts of the Earth Kingdom, his wallet getting progressively lighter and his body more unwashed with every day. He’d developed a reputation for being the “surprisingly eloquent Water Tribe barbarian who was good entertainment at bars”, though, and at this point, he could walk into any alcohol-serving establishment and only have to pay for a few shots. 

His drunken poetry was a hit wherever he went, and people would line up to buy him drinks for the rest of the night. If he was lucky, he’d get a free room out of it and maybe even a warm body to spend the night with, though the warm bodies were becoming increasingly harder to come by the further inland he moved. Earth Kingdom citizens weren’t exactly keen on bedding down with strangers from the Water Tribe, no matter how much effort the Tribes (and by extension, Sokka) had poured into post-war outreach.

He sighed, re-rolled the scroll and tucked it into his belt, and thought of how Suki would scold him for creating permanent creases in the paper. Then he squished it even harder. Suki wasn’t going to say anything to him now, and anyways, she’d lost her bossing rights. She’d relinquished them, and he’d taken them away. He tucked the letter securely into his belt.

Replying to the letter, even just _thinking_ about the letter, would be a job for a different Sokka. Still a drunken Sokka, but maybe a Sokka who wasn’t preparing to get even drunker. Or a Sokka who wasn’t about to drown his feelings in more alcohol or women. He took another shot and smiled unsteadily at the lady across the table. She smiled back, resting a warm hand on his bicep.

“Your hair falls like snow,” he slurred, grinning toothily at her. In this light, he could almost pretend that it was true, the dim light of the lanterns reflecting off her black hair in slivers of feathery moonlight.

“Wait, no, shit. That one’s about Yue. My bad.”

The woman scowled, then retracted her hand as if he’d suddenly developed firebending. 

“Hey, hang on, wait. Let me fix this,” Sokka whined. “I’ll write you your own poem.”

But she was gone. Sokka hit his head against the table and did his best to melt into a puddle of alcoholic sludge. He let his cheek rest on the cool wooden tabletop for a moment, then shrugged, lifting his head and downing another cup. He decided to drink until he couldn’t keep his eyes open and let tomorrow’s Sokka try to fix his life in the morning.

///

“You remind me of a woman I knew when I was younger,” Sokka said. 

Another day, another bar, only this time he was a little drunker than he really should be. He had just finished off a carafe of plum wine and was considering another when a _gorgeous_ older woman in her mid-to-late thirties sat down next to him. She was the prettiest woman he’d seen in a long time, with long dark hair and sharp eyes that set off her pale skin. Sokka hoped that his drunken brain could manage to string together metaphors good enough to keep her attention for the night.

The woman laughed. “Really.” It wasn’t a question. For some reason, Sokka had the distinct impression that she was indulging him. Like he was a fat baby clamoring for candy, and she was thinking of giving him another piece while his parents weren’t looking. Weird indulgent attention was better than no attention, though, and he’d take what he could get. Especially when it came from a lady as beautiful as this one. She was like a coiled viper, sinuous, but beautiful enough to temper his sense of danger with excitement.

“She was maybe the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen in my life. ‘Course, at that point, I’d only seen, what, fifty girls total, not counting grannies.”

The one rational part of his mind groaned. Six years of adulthood hadn’t done anything to improve his skill at talking to the ladies. The rest of his alcohol-addled brain was triumphant when the woman guffawed, slapping her open palm on the table. The table shook with the impact, sending Sokka’s ceramic cup hopping into the air and rattling the empty carafe. The salted peanuts skittered in their dish.

“See?” Sokka popped a few peanuts into his mouth. “You’re even strong. Like her.”

The woman tipped the remnants of her carafe into Sokka’s empty cup. It was some stronger liquor, a clear alcohol that smelled like drying lacquer. 

“You’re funny,” she said. “You should tell me more about this girl.”

Sokka downed the liquid in one shot, barely noticing the taste. The stench of the alcohol burned his sinuses going down, though, and tickled the hairs in his nose when he breathed out.

“Well, I met her when I was maybe sixteen. I’d been traveling with the— with some friends, and we were being chased by this guy we weren’t on good terms with.” He laughed at that. What an understatement. At the time, thinking about the banished prince stressed him out so much that he would have given up both his pinkies and maybe some extra fingers if it meant that Zuko would drop dead somewhere. He continued.

“And this guy wasn’t happy with us, so he hired a bounty hunter to track us down.”

The woman raised her eyebrow at him, then ate some of his snap peas. The Earth Kingdom served weird stuff to go with their drinks: snap peas, thin slices of spiced beef, jellified pig-deer knuckles with the bones still in. One bar had served him _fried grubs_.

(Sokka had been dead drunk when he worked up the courage to try them. They were really good, crunchy on the outside and soft and silky on the inside. Kind of nutty-tasting. He’d tried to order them again at a different bar, but it seemed like he’d just missed the tail end of grub-eating season. He told himself that he wasn’t disappointed. That bug eating was _weird_.

But was it? As a teenager, he’d certainly tried weirder stuff when he was desperate and hungry. 

They all had.)

“What happened next?” His companion’s voice, smooth and silky, cut through his wandering thoughts.

“I didn’t know about this at the time, but he told me the whole story way later, once we’d sorted all our misunderstandings out. Turns out he dragged his elderly uncle to the seediest bar in the entire Makapu Range and found this drop-dead gorgeous bounty hunter to track us down.”

Sokka held up the carafe and waved it in the direction of the bar until the bartender nodded and brought them a refill of plum wine. Sokka filled the woman’s cup, then his own. 

“He had something that belonged to my sister, and she used her crazy mole-bear-whatever pet to find us. It had these _hand-looking things_ on its face.” He shuddered. The first few days after they’d escaped the abbey, he’d dreamed of those hands reaching out of the monster’s snout and grabbing him.

“Huh,” the woman said. Her eyes brimmed with something that seemed suspiciously like mirth. Did she not believe him?

“Lady, you’re super-duper extremely sexy, but I don’t talk to sexy women if they’re mean.” Sokka jabbed an unsteady finger in her direction. “If you want to hear the whole story, I don’t want to see you laughing at me.”

She placed her hand on his shoulder. Sokka felt strangely fuzzy at the point of contact, like he'd been stung by something mildly venomous. _Get it together, Sokka,_ he thought. _You’re way too drunk, and you have to stop throwing yourself at any random person just because you miss Suki._

It was hard to think about that, though, so Sokka steered his mind back to the story.

“Anyway, so. She thought my sister was the Fire Lord’s ex-girlfriend, can you believe it?”

The woman’s lips quirked upwards in a half-smile. “ _Is_ your sister the Fire Lord’s ex-girlfriend?”

Sokka laughed. “Absolutely not. That would be insane.” He paused. “She’s too good for him, but he’s also too good for her.” 

He shrugged. “Siblings, you know? Gotta love ‘em and hate ‘em at the same time.”

“I wouldn’t know.”

Sokka nodded. “And then the super sexy, super terrifying woman tried to poison us with her pet, but we escaped. There’s a lot more to the story, but the gist of it is that it all worked out in the end. Later, we hired her to help us find our missing friend, then our friend’s missing Uncle. He’d dropped a sandal or something, and she tracked the old guy down with just the fumes from that one shoe.”

Sokka shuddered. The sandal had been so stained and grimy that you could have practically seen the fumes coming off it, and Zuko had just been, what, carrying a biohazard around with them the whole time? It was a miracle that none of them had caught some kind of disease.

He tossed a few more peanuts in his mouth, then sipped at his liquor. “She was super cool, super beautiful, and she could kick everyone’s ass. Except maybe my girlfr—” Sokka cut himself off. What was he doing, waxing poetic about a woman he once knew to a woman he was trying to impress? “Never mind. Anyway, my point is, she was so cool that my baby sister wanted to grow up to be just like her for a while.”

The woman tossed her head back and barked at the wooden ceiling in laughter. “Really?” She turned to him, eyes narrowed in a smile. Her lips were painted in a burgundy so dark it was almost black in the low lighting of the bar.

Sokka grinned. Talking about his sister to this lady wasn’t the best way to sweeten his chances, but it beat talking about women who were totally unrelated to him. Maybe he could salvage the night after all.

“I’m one hundred percent serious. She had a phase when she was sixteen where she only wore black and went all-in on her makeup. I’m talking smudgy coal eyes and dark lip color. She used squid ink on her lips or something. She’s dark like me though, so the effect wasn’t as nice as it is on you. It wasn’t too bad, either. Her boyfriend hated it, though.”

“That’s flattering.” The woman laughed again, the sound piercing and familiar even through the fog of alcohol stifling his senses. “I can imagine how it looked.”

Sokka frowned. His drunken brain was coming so close to a realization that he could almost taste it. It was like Sozin’s comet all over again, like something coming perilously close to his conception of the world and threatening to shatter the small peace he’d managed to scrounge up for himself amidst all the terror and anxiety.

“Hey,” he says, putting his cup down. “I said you looked really familiar, but do I actually know you or something? It’s just that you sound kind of like her, too.”

The woman looked at him slyly. “If you’re trying to pick me up, Sokka, it’s not working. You’re too young for me, anyway. Even if you’ve grown up a little.”

Sokka frowned. Had he introduced himself? His reputation preceded him in some places, but the Earth Kingdom citizens mostly knew him as Suo-Ka after one merchant printed some of his poems and bastardized his name to fit into Earth Kingdom characters. He hadn’t even gotten any money out of publication. The rat-faced thief had just gone and printed scrolls of his poetry without asking and then pulled a disappearing act when Sokka tried to confront him about it.

“Wait.” Sozin’s metaphorical comet was breaching the outer layers of Sokka’s hazy mind and burning up into a fireball. Sokka stood up. “I know you. You’re—”

Standing up was too much. All the wine he’d drunk that night suddenly decided to take the express route from his gut to his brain, and Sokka felt himself fall sideways towards the ground as his vision went dark.

///

“Wake up, Sokka.”

Sokka groaned. Suki’s voice was harsher than usual and his body tensed unconsciously. He hated these kinds of mornings, and he could tell from her tone that they were going to end up arguing. Sokka burrowed his head further under the covers and tried to go back to sleep. If they were going to be at each other’s throats before he got out of bed, he might as well get a few more hours of rest before blowing the morning up. The extra sleep might help cure this pounding headache, too. Maybe Suki would go easy on him, since he was clearly sick. His mouth was so dry and his shirt felt drenched in sweat.

Sometimes, he wondered if his relationship with Suki was actually healthy. He’d done everything he could to make her happy. Moving in with her on Kyoshi Island had just been the cherry on top. At the beginning of their life together on the island, he’d been sure that they would be giddy with love forever. Suki had been busy training the newest crop of recruits, and Sokka was happy to play house-husband for his strikingly beautiful, insanely talented girlfriend. Everything was perfect until it wasn’t. At some point, Sokka staying home and keeping house stopped being enough for either of them.

He hoped his sickness would get so bad that he fainted and bypassed the impending argument entirely.

“Sokka. Get up, you drunkard.”

Suki wrenched the covers away from his face, and spears of light lanced through his closed eyelids. Sokka flinched away from the sun and curled back towards the bedsheet. His body stiffened into a ball, his hands folded protectively over his scrunched-up eyes. He felt like a dying pillbug.

Suki was suspiciously quiet, given that she knew he’d been drinking. Sokka cracked one eye open and peeked through a slit in his fingers. 

Suki was standing in front of the bed, but she was all wrong. Everything about her was longer and sharper than normal: she was taller, and her face longer, and her grin decidedly unfriendly. The woman who had yanked the covers away from him wasn’t Suki at all. 

Sokka shrieked loudly, scrambling away from the edge of the bed until his back hit the wall. He clutched at his head and willed the streaks of pain to subside. When they faded into a dull ache, he patted at his body — clothes, check — and looked up at the woman again.

It was June, the bounty hunter. He hadn’t seen her since they’d gone searching for Zuko’s mother ages ago. What was she doing here?

“June?” He squeaked. The sound of his own voice poked needles through his brain. “What are you doing here?”

June held out a cup of water for him. “You don’t remember?” She asked, smirking.

Sokka stared at her as the memories solidified in his brain like a fleet of ships sailing through heavy fog. He groaned and placed his head in his hands as the ships docked, the memories disembarked, and the humiliation marched straight towards him.

“No,” he admitted slowly, wishing he could just black out again. “I remember now. But I’d like you to forget it.”

June chuckled. “Last night was the best entertainment I’d gotten all year,” she said, taking the cup back from him. “I’m not about to forget the fact that two teenagers I terrorized somehow developed crushes on me anyway. You really know how to stroke a woman’s ego.” She winked.

Sokka shrunk further in on himself and double-checked his clothing. The ties of his pants were fastened securely, but one could never be too careful. “Just to check, uh. We, uh. We didn’t do anything, right?”

June shook her head and clutched at her sides, too busy laughing to give him a proper response.

“Are you doing this on purpose? Please tell me you’re doing this on purpose, and that you plan on disappearing and never talking to me again after having your fun.”

June laughed louder as Sokka pulled at his hair. If he hurt other parts of himself, maybe it would distract from the hangover. 

It didn’t work. It just made the outside of his head hurt almost as much as the inside of his head.

“What are you doing here?” June asked, taking pity on him. Had the years of peacetime mellowed her out? Years ago, she had seemed like the type of woman who loved watching men embarrass themselves.

“I broke up with my girlfriend. Suki. Do you remember her? Kyoshi warrior, super badass?”

“And could take me in a fight, according to you?” Her tone was wry.

Sokka could _kill_ past-drunk-Sokka, if only it didn’t mean that he’d have to take his hands to his own throat. If there was ever an argument for teetotaling, humiliating and endangering himself in front of an incredibly beautiful, incredibly dangerous woman _that he was on first-name terms with_ was it. “I mean, maybe? I was pretty in love with her. But you’re cool too,” he finished weakly.

June raised one eyebrow, fixing him with a stare that made him squirm, then looked down at the battered sheet of paper in her hands. It was creased and intermittently grimy in segments, and it looked like it had survived some close calls with saltwater.

“I read your letter.” June said, waving it in front of his face. “You look like you could use some help and some real human interaction.”

“I guess,” Sokka ignored the implications of her statement. “I’m doing pretty well for myself, all things considered. People like my poetry.”

She raised the other eyebrow. “You consider drinking yourself into oblivion and spouting drunken lines every night to be a personal achievement?” 

Sokka looked down. The bedsheets were coarse, rumpled, and stained a faint yellow color. He picked at a snagged thread and avoided June’s gaze.

“I’ve seen a lot of guys like you,” June continued. “If you want to keep living like this, go ahead. I’ll give you ten years, tops, before you die of renal failure. Or of a drunken brawl.”

Sokka shrugged. Talking to June felt oddly like talking to Gran Gran. He wondered if women just developed some kind of pushy health awareness as they got older. Suki had started to be like that near the end, too.

He changed the subject. “How did I end up here, anyway? Where is this?”

“You passed out, and the bartender made me take you with me. Normally, I would just dump you on the side of the road, but since you’re an old customer, I made an exception.” June picked at her nails, flicking the dislodged dirt at the scuffed wooden floor. She seemed utterly bored with the turn that the conversation had taken.

“Thanks,” Sokka wasn’t sure what else to say. “What are you going to do now?”

“I’m in between jobs right now, so I’ve got no plans. Nyla and I were headed to Ba Sing Se.” June stood up, bent forward, and touched her toes in one flowing movement. “I have a good feeling about you, so you can hitch a ride with us."

Sokka frowned. “I don’t have money to pay you, June. Plus, you’ve already done enough for me. And I’m not even sure I’m going to head that way yet.”

This time, June’s laugh was the most genuine he’d heard from her. “None of this is free,” she said, eyes hard and glinting like a predator’s. “I don’t do charity work, especially not for ex-war heroes. You’re going to pay for my time and any supplies, including the water you just drank.”

Sokka stared at her, mouth open. The peace had _not_ mellowed her out. June cut him off before he could begin his sentence. “Don’t worry. I know _you’re_ totally broke. But you’ve got friends in high places. I’ll send an itemized bill to the Avatar.”

She was as terrifying as he’d remembered. For the third time that day, Sokka wished that the effects of a hangover could get strong enough to knock him out.

///

He stayed regrettably conscious. 

Journey by creepy mole-thing was just as bad as he remembered. Nyla recognized him, for one. The shirshu slinked right up to him and shoved his terrifying tentacle-nose at Sokka’s head, then wiggled it all over his face. Sokka felt the individual finger-tentacles grope around the planes of his cheeks and down his jawline, and just barely escaped a flesh-tendril-thing up the nose. 

Once they were on the road, it got worse. The shirshu’s stride was horrifically fast and jerky, giving the things in the distance the nauseating effect of seeming to move faster than the things in the foreground. Sokka spent the entire trip throwing up over the side and trying not to die.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading!
> 
> This fic was inspired by [the firebender’s guide to living life after destiny](https://archiveofourown.org/works/25507945/chapters/61883566) by chuffystilton. It is a work of art; if you haven't read it yet, you should definitely give it a try.


	2. Chapter 2

The first indication that they’d almost reached Ba Sing Se was the rapid change in topography. Nyla turned sharply and barreled through a patch of forest, and Sokka flinched as low-hanging branches slapped at his face and sent wisp-thin cuts sparking across his cheeks. Suddenly, they were out of the mountains and galloping across the meandering floodplains. He could barely make out the shape of the Outer Wall of Ba Sing Se in the far distance.

The terrain radiating from Ba Sing Se was segmented into rectangular patches of agrarian land in a late summer spectrum of greens, oranges, and yellows. The Pearl River trembled atop the sprawling geometric quilt of farmland, tamed by the farmers and their fields. The river’s clear water shimmered under the late afternoon sun, and Sokka could make out the shadowy outlines of sturgeon cutting lazily through the river. 

He was struck by an unexpected need to slip out of the saddle and join them in the water. If he could just live life as a fish, with nothing more imperative than the yearly spring journey up the river to spawn, maybe he could put all the thoughts running through his head down. Let them dry up on a riverbank far away.

Sokka shook his head, running a hand through his hair and grimacing at the greasy feeling of it between his fingers. Dreams were just dreams, and they’d have to end eventually. Better to not start at all and avoid the heartbreak completely.

He’d had enough heartbreak for two lifetimes. 

Seeing the land for the first time in years sent a pulse of nostalgia through him; Sokka hadn’t visited Ba Sing Se since shortly after the battle for Yu Dao. He’d been so busy resolving various international and interpersonal crises the first few years, and then immediately after things seemed to have settled down, he’d gone to visit Suki on Kyoshi Island. She had been so important to him, and their relationship so _final_ , that it had just made sense to put roots down. He hadn’t left Kyoshi Island for three years except to visit the South Pole.

He’d given so much up for her, and what had he gotten out of it? Suki hadn’t wasted any of those seven years. She was right where she needed to be the entire time, protecting the Fire Lord and then training the next generation of warriors on Kyoshi Island and passing down an important piece of her cultural heritage. Suki had always known just where her destiny was.

And Sokka. Well, _Sokka_ had floated from place to place like a piece of jetsam, tagging along with his sister and the Avatar, assisting the Fire Lord, and then finally washing up on the shore of his girlfriend’s hometown. No one really needed him, and sometimes, on dark days, he wasn’t sure they actually wanted him around.

He was struck with an intense bout of nausea. He gripped the edge of the saddle and leaned over the side, watching as the remains of his lunch splattered over some poor farmer’s perfectly green cabbages, barely missing Nyla’s side.

“Watch the boots,” June said mildly, lifting her foot forward and out of the danger zone. Her voice was dry, but Sokka thought he could detect a note of sympathy. June was a businesswoman through and through, if you considered mercenary-ing and bounty hunting a legitimate form of business, but she wasn’t cold-hearted. He liked to think that she’d grown fond of him, but deep down, he knew it was wishful thinking. June was too good for someone like him.

“Sorry,” Sokka said, voice cracking. He wiped his mouth, then uncorked June’s water gourd and poured a generous glug into his sour mouth. He swished the water around, pushing it back and forth between his cheeks, then leaned over again and sprayed it over another row of cabbages.

“Good thing nobody’s out to see this,” June snorted. “Or they’d charge me for property damage. Then I’d have to pass it on to you, plus a fifteen percent service charge.”

Sokka corked the gourd and returned it to its place on the saddle, looping its cords securely onto the hook. They passed a few more kilometers in a quiet sort of companionship, then June broke the silence as the walls of the city began to loom over the land, casting a long shadow towards the east. Now that they were closer, Sokka could make out the barracks in their roosts atop the wall, forming a jagged, intimidating shape against the empty blue sky. The colors of the farmland under the shade of the wall were deeper and richer, as if they’d been spared from the bleaching brightness of the sun.

“Where’s the old guy’s place, anyway?”

Sokka frowned. Iroh hadn’t included any actual directions in his letter, and his memory of the tea shop was fuzzy. “Somewhere in the Upper Ring on the east side?” He’d never really had to navigate Ba Sing Se by himself. The last time he’d been to the Jasmine Dragon, Appa had just landed in the middle of the courtyard. Traveling with the Avatar had its perks, but it also meant trailing in the shadow of his overachieving sister and her war hero boyfriend, being little more than a glorified air bison valet service.

They were all war heroes, technically, but Aang was an extra-special war hero. Could Avatars be classified as war heroes? Anyway. Aang was the Avatar, the last of his people, the one who single-handedly brought down the last of the despotic Fire Lords and kept the current one in check. It was hard for anyone to compete with him, no matter how talented they were. 

—one of the things he’d loved about Suki was how competent, how _lethal_ , she was, despite being a non-bender. Being with Suki had made Sokka feel safe, in a strange way. She had understood him, and though he always felt pressure to make her proud, he’d never felt like he needed to prove himself with her in the way that being around benders did. And now, without her, Sokka felt—

June nodded, her bun and hairpiece bobbing up and down with the movement. Her voice snapped Sokka out of his spiral of self-loathing and heartbreak. “We can work with that. Nyla probably remembers that old man’s stench, anyways.” 

Too busy throwing up the remnants of his rice porridge, Sokka hadn’t realized how close they were to the city proper. The Outer Wall loomed higher and higher as he looked up, and suddenly they were shivering under its shadow. The temperature dropped almost immediately as they crossed into the shade and the hairs on Sokka’s arms tickled as gooseflesh began to bunch along his skin. 

“Aren’t you Water Tribe types supposed to be immune to the cold?” June asked.

Sokka grumbled and wrapped his arms around his chest. “That’s a common misconception,” he replied. “Also, rude.”

June shrugged. “I guess. Don’t know much about you guys, though I did meet a Water Tribe man once. By the name of Hakoda. Now that was an incredibly attractive man. Rugged, handsome, and built like a platypus bear. What I wouldn’t give to climb him like a tree.”

Sokka blanched and crossed his fingers, weighed the risk in his head, and then took the plunge. “Northern or Southern?” 

“No idea, but I’d say Southern, if I had to guess. He mentioned that they’d passed by Kyoshi Island on their way up.”

Sokka shuddered. “Okay,” he said, wishing his voice didn’t jump up an octave when he was stressed. Squeaking was not dignified. “Cool, cool, cool, cool. Cool!”

“Do you know him or something?”

“Oh, no, absolutely not.” Sokka coughed, then made an effort to pitch his voice lower. Perversely, the coughing had the opposite effect. “No idea who you’re talking about at all!”

June cackled. “You do know him!” She stopped for a moment, quiet, then howled with laughter, throwing her head back and whapping him in the face with her bun.

She’d figured it out.

Sokka slammed his face into his hands and groaned. 

“He mentioned Kyoshi Island because he had a son living there! I thought he just got around a lot, but the son was _you_!” June swiveled around to look at him, her heavily lined eyelids making her narrowed, gleeful eyes look even more snakelike. Her pale face was red from laughter and her voice had acquired a slight wheezy quality to it. “Your dad is a work of fine art, kid. Come hit me up in ten years, alright?”

“Uh. I’ll, um, remember that, I guess.” Sokka made a desperate attempt to scramble off Nyla’s back as they stopped at the gate, but June reached out with a lightning-quick hand and clamped down on his forearm.

“If both you and your sister thought I was hot, maybe I do have a chance with your dad.”

Sokka tried pulling out of June’s grip, but the woman’s hands were like stone. He made an exaggerated gagging sound instead. “June, that’s gross, and he’s taken.”

June sighed but didn’t sound put out at all. She let go of Sokka’s arm, and he rubbed at it to get some of his circulation back. “The way you say it, it doesn’t sound like they’re looking for a third. Oh well. There are plenty more fish in the sea.”

He nodded vigorously. “Maybe try the northern tribes instead. Lots of fish there!” 

Maybe June could seduce Arnook in a major coup. It would make dealing with the Northern Tribe way more tolerable and significantly more hilarious.

“Identification?” The uniformed guard at the gate seemed to have gotten tired of waiting. He stood there with his hand outstretched, scowling at them.

June fished around in a saddlebag, then extended her hand and dropped a cord-strung metal token into his hands. The black tassel affixed to the bottom of the round disc swung jauntily though the air. “June, bounty hunter. I’ve got special clearance from the King to enter whenever I like.”

The guard stared at the emblem in his hands, expression suddenly nervous. He flipped it over, then immediately tossed it back up to June, who snatched it out of the air with one hand. The guard scrambled away as quickly as he could, signaled to the men manning the portcullis, then whistled and looked away pointedly as the gate creaked upwards to let them into the city.

“Special identification, huh. Can I see it?” Sokka asked as Nyla bounded through the Agrarian Zone. The outermost ring of the city didn’t look much different from the technically-ungoverned lands just outside the wall. He spotted Aang’s zoo in the distance.

June smirked over her shoulder and dropped it in his hand. “Don’t drop it. It’s worth more than your weight in gold, that’s for sure.”

The medallion was roughly the diameter of a mandarin orange and was the color of brass, though it shone with a luster much finer than that of the common alloy. Sokka turned it this way and that, admiring the gleam of the sun’s rays where they struck the metal. One side had been embossed with a pattern of blooming plum branches and sparrows, and another with a strikingly detailed recreation of the landscape of Ba Sing Se as seen from the top of the outer wall. The cord woven through the square hole punched in the middle of the token ended in a knotted silk tassel so fine that it dripped like liquid between his fingers.

Whoever had made the mold that cast this token was incredibly talented. Sokka could see at least twenty distinct rooftops crammed into the small space on the disk. He flipped the medallion over to admire the shapes of the plum blossoms, then saw a collection of strokes and lines hidden among one of the branches. He whistled. The Earth Kingdom character for “handsome”, no larger than his pinky fingernail, was nestled in a gap in the flowers. Funny. He always assumed June’s name would be written with the character for “military”, for some reason. He handed it back to her.

“Your sister’s ex-boyfriend arranged it for me, actually, as payment for my services over the years, and as a sort of retainer agreement. I’ve got one for the Fire Nation and one for the Earth Kingdom. Makes dominating my competition awfully convenient. ”

“My sister’s ex... “ The gears turned in Sokka’s head. It couldn’t have been Jet, who had lived a very impoverished life and was also very dead. Did Haru count as an ex? What was she talking about? Suddenly, his drunken conversation with June came rushing back at him. He gaped at her.

“Zuko gave you that?” He asked, astonished. June just nodded. He whistled. 

“Wonder if I could weasel one of those out of him.”

June flashed her token at the set of guards at the second gate, and they were in the Lower Ring before Sokka could even process the interaction. Nyla took a running leap and landed on top of a run-down building, then crossed the entirety of the lower ring by rooftop, dislodging potted plants and lines of laundry on their way through and ignoring the angry shouts of the populace. 

///

By the time June deposited him in the paved courtyard of Iroh’s tea shop in front of an entire crowd of gawking customers, Sokka was thoroughly motion sick. He tried to calm the churning feeling in his gut as he hung onto the coarse fur of the shirshu’s side and regained feeling in his shaky, burning legs. Riding Nyla was nothing like riding a polar bear. Sokka’s entire lower body from the waist down felt like it had been pummeled by stones. 

They’d been on the road since what he privately called the asscrack of dawn, stopping only for bathroom breaks. And they hadn’t stopped at all since entering the city, where the ride had become extra turbulent due to the added obstacles of loose laundry and angry bystanders. At this point, Sokka thought he might be willing to commit murder if it meant a chance at a hot bath and maybe a massage.

The murmuring of the crowd quieted as a figure stepped out of the main tearoom and made its way through the throng. The way the man cut his way effortlessly through the crowd reminded Sokka of a turtleduck barely rippling the surface of a pond as it swam. Something about the man’s smooth weaving through the erratic movements of the patrons triggered another wave of motion sickness, so Sokka lowered his head and kept his eyes focused on a pebble on the ground. He willed himself to not throw up.

June greeted the man first. “Hey, Lee. Been a while.”

“June,” the man said, his gravelly voice warm and uncannily familiar. He stopped beside the fountain. “It’s a pleasure to see you again.”

Sokka’s stomach calmed down enough for him to risk looking up slowly. The man named Lee wore plain shoes and olive pants under a lighter green robe. Sokka’s eyes slid further up to his face. His head was turned slightly to look at June, so Sokka mostly got a glimpse of metal-rimmed glasses and a wrinkled and ridged burn scar.

“Zu—” June cut Sokka’s squeak off with a hand over his mouth. Sokka’s brain ran frantic circles inside his head. _What was the Fire Lord doing in Ba Sing Se?_

“You remember Lee, don’t you, Sokka?” June released her hold on Sokka’s face, wiping her hand off on the cleanest section of his shirt.

“Sokka?” The man’s face lit up as Sokka met his eyes. 

“Lee?” Sokka replied slowly, tone halting and unsure. 

“Sokka! It’s good to see you again, buddy.” Lee-Zuko said. He stepped forward and enfolded Sokka into his arms. The hug was warm, and Zuko-Lee-Zuko smelled a little herbal, like he’d been working inside a storage room for a while. They stood there for a beat, then Zuko-Lee sniffed and retracted his hug rather quickly.

“How long have you guys been on the road? You smell kind of… gross.”

“Two days, but Water Tribe here probably hasn’t had a proper bath in months.”

The onlookers gasped as one. There was a very marked pause before the crowd rippled away from them. The courtyard was cleared in seconds as all the patrons returned to their seats, some of them picking up their tea sets and relocating as far inside the tea rooms as possible. Sokka’s face burned, and he felt the beginnings of an anxiety sweat break out over his skin. 

June laughed. “This is where I leave you, kid.” She was mounted on the saddle in an instant and bent down to whisper in Nyla’s ear. Then she was gone, narrowly avoiding mowing down a customer walking up the steps to the courtyard.

“I’ll see you in ten years. Or if the Avatar refuses to pay your bills!”

Sokka looked at his mud-caked shoes, then at the clean white tile covering the ground. Everything in the tea shop was clean: the gently scuffed paving stones, the gurgling water features, the sculpted trees in their angular marble pots. Everything but Sokka and the dried flakes of dirt around his feet.

“Jin, can you take over for the afternoon?” Zuko locked eyes with a woman in green who nodded. He turned to Sokka and slung a clean arm over his shoulders. Sokka slumped under the weight, trying to squirm away, but Zuko held his arm in a gentle grip. 

“Let’s get you a little more respectable. You’re going to scare all the customers off.”

Zuko steered him towards a moon gate set in the west wall of the courtyard, seemingly oblivious to Sokka’s general grubby shamefulness. 

They passed under the arch in silence. The gate opened up into a small walled garden suffused with the fragrance of osmanthus flowers. A little house sat at the far end of the garden, shaded on one side by a large mulberry tree. Next to the house was a little vine-laden pergola made from dried bamboo rods. The garden itself was mostly vegetable plots interspersed with ornamental bushes tamed into orderly shapes. 

The sight of the garden, cute and cheery, made Sokka temporarily forget his own abject griminess. He ducked under Zuko’s arm and made a beeline for the pergola, admiring the way the vines twined over the latticed roof. The top of the structure was entirely covered by broad green leaves, almost completely shading the packed dirt underneath it. There was a little wooden bench placed snugly against the wall of the house.

“Hey! You’ve got hulu gourds!” Sokka looked up at the underside of the roof and studied the fat squashes dangling in the shade. They were pear-shaped and almost as long as his head, their skins faintly fuzzy and brightly green.

“And they look really nice, too!"

Zuko stopped to stand next to him, neck craned upwards. The hulu leaves shading the roof swayed in the wind, dappling a miniature hurricane of light and shadow across Zuko’s face. He reached out to touch a gourd, running his fingers over its fuzzy skin. “I don’t actually know what they are. I only arrived yesterday, and I haven’t gotten around to reading Uncle’s instructions for the garden.”

“You’ve never seen these before?”

“I was a Prince, you know. And then I was a banished Prince. And now I’m the Fire Lord.” Zuko said wryly. “Not a lot of time to go traipsing around the garden when those are your job titles.”

“Yeah, but a lot of people in the Earth Kingdom like drying these guys and using them as water containers. You tie a cord around the neck of the gourd and carry it around like that. If you plant them yourself, you can carve little pictures or characters into the skin when they’re still growing.”

He’d made a few water bottles for Suki, years ago, when he’d taken up gardening during his second summer on Kyoshi Island. One of the Kyoshi Warriors, Lina, had told him that the gourds were easy for beginners to grow, so he’d gone out and bought some seeds to try his hand at it. Sokka remembered being so excited when the seeds sprouted and the vines put out their first flowers. That summer, he woke up early each morning to see if the flowers had fruited. 

Once the little squash buds started expanding, he’d spent hours drafting his designs on spare paper around Suki’s house. He narrowed them down to three ideas, then took a little knife to each gourd and etched the patterns into them, practicing on the first ones and marking more gourds than he needed to. When autumn rolled around, Sokka presented the three prettiest ones, tied around the necks with cords he braided himself, to Suki. Her smile had been luminous.

“What do you mean, carve little pictures?” Zuko’s voice broke through Sokka’s reverie.

Sokka dragged the bench into the middle of the pergola and hopped up. He sorted through the gourds for a nicely shaped one, then drew his machete. He cupped the fist-sized squash in his palm and looked down at Zuko, who was squinting up at him through his glasses with an air of confusion.

Ha. The Fire Lord, suffering from early-onset vision problems.

“How do you write your name again?”

“The character for awaken, with the grass radical, and the character for subject, or branch. Grain radical.”

Sokka stuck his tongue out as he carved the characters into the skin meticulously. He would not embarrass himself in front of the Fire Lord with his messy handwriting, especially not after that summer spent practicing his carving skills.

“Done,” he said after a long moment, twisting the vine back and forth to admire his work. Not too shabby, though the second character was a little distorted by the curve of the fruit. He tugged at the vine gently, loosening the vine a little so Zuko’s squash hung a little lower than the rest of its siblings, then got off the bench.

“Go take a look,” Sokka said with a little flourish of his hands.

Zuko stepped up, took the hulu fruit gently into his hand, and stared at it for a moment. Sokka fidgeted under him, suddenly nervous.

“This looks better than I thought it would,” Zuko said with amusement. “You just carve the surface?"

“Just the outer layer, otherwise it might rot.”

Zuko fished through the vines for another small gourd and held his hand out for the knife. He sliced at it for a moment, twisting the globular surface as he etched the skin, then released the fruit and pulled down another. He paused for a moment, then looked down at Sokka, glasses sliding down the slope of his nose.

“How do you write your name?”

“ _Suo_ , as in to ask or to require, and _Ka_ , as in card.”

“Okay.”

Sokka stared unabashedly up at Zuko as the man drew the tip of the knife over the squash. His friend had grown from a gangly teen into a confident man in the years between their last meeting, and Sokka noted with a tinge of jealousy that the Fire Lord was handsome, even with the scar. He had the exact same faint lines in face as Sokka did, ones developed from scowling too much as teenagers. But while Sokka’s made him look like a stressed bullfrog, Zuko’s somehow made him look good-humored.

 _Save some for the rest of us_ , Sokka thought bitterly, then tamped that thought down. He forced a smile at the side of his friend’s face instead. It wasn’t Zuko’s fault that he’d drawn the genetic lottery, or that he was in a covetable position of power and influence. Sokka knew Zuko had suffered just as much as the rest of them had, only in different ways. He refused to be a crappy friend about his turn in fortune, especially knowing what he did about the Fire Lord’s family history.

Zuko dropped down next to him and Sokka’s eyes flicked away as Zuko nudged the bench back against the wall. They stood there for two heartbeats, Sokka with his head turned to the garden and Zuko following his gaze. The wind danced across the leaves on the pergola roof and tugged gently at their clothing. For a moment, Sokka felt like an empty bottle drifting across the sea. Free and unburdened of heartbreak.

“I hate to ruin our arts and crafts moment, but I really do think you need a bath.”

The moment was broken, and Sokka flinched, ashamed. He steadied his heart, then said, with as much cheeriness as he could muster, “Lead on, Lord Fieriness.”

///

Zuko’s bathroom was decadent. He had an entire room just for bathing, with stone floors and a large wooden bathtub set in on one side of the room. Sokka stood by the wall, buck naked and watching water pour out of a pipe in the wall and into the bathtub. 

“You can stop now,” he yelled through the wall.

“Okay,” came Zuko’s reply.

The best part of bathing in the Fire Lord’s bathroom was that the Fire Lord himself was heating his bathwater.

Sokka grabbed a coarse towel and dipped it in the steaming water. He scrubbed the grime off his body, cringing as the cream-colored fabric came away streaked and filthy. He dipped a small wooden bucket into the water, poured it over his body to rinse the remaining dirt off, and gingerly lowered his body into the tub.

Correction. The best part of bathing in the Fire Lord’s bathroom was that the Fire Lord himself heated the bathwater to a perfect temperature. Take that, Suki. Sokka was moving up in life.

Sokka watched as a wave sloshed over the lip of the tub, displaced by the addition of his body to the bath. The excess water whirlpooled and sunk into a grated drain set into the floor. 

The bathroom was _fancy_. Back on Kyoshi Island, it was the communal bathhouse or the lake. Even further back, in the South Pole, most of the time you _did not_ bathe unless you wanted to die of hypothermia. Sokka had hated baths until he left the South Pole. The first time Katara made him scrub down in a chilly river, Sokka had been genuinely afraid that the drop in body temperature would kill them all in their sleep. That whole night, he worried that Katara would end up welcomed into the Fire Nation as the Avatar’s killer. 

“Doing okay in there?”

The worst part of bathing in the Fire Lord’s bathroom was the Fire Lord’s muffled yelling coming through the wall. Zuko really didn’t understand the concept of ambiance. 

“Just peachy!”

“Great. I’ll be in the sitting room when you’re ready.”

“Cool!”

Sokka soaked for what felt like an hour of blessed silence, letting the acid burning through his body melt away. He climbed out of the tub with extreme reluctance when his fingers and toes felt unbearably pruney and the temperature of the water dropped to something more unpleasant than just lukewarm.

He dressed in the Earth Kingdom clothes Zuko had left for him: pants, tunic, and robe. Sokka wiped his feet off with a towel, then opened the door and put on the woven slippers Zuko had left just outside the bathroom.

He found Zuko in the sitting room. He was reading under the last light of the afternoon, a tea set resting on the table in front of him. Sokka took the seat directly across the table and studied the deep mahogany grain of the wood as he searched for the right words. They darted out of his reach, like goldfish fleeing from a ripple in a pond.

“Alright, I can’t just put this off.” Sokka squared his shoulders. The Fire Lord re-rolled his scroll, tied it shut, and looked up, eyes honey-gold and warm.

“What the _fuck_ are you doing here?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> On the character for June's name, hidden in the medallion:
> 
> As far as I know, ATLA canon never gives us the character(s) for June's name. The two characters mentioned in this chapter are "俊" (jùn, meaning handsome or talented), and "军／軍" (jūn, soldier or military). In reality, both of these would be very unusual names for a girl, and 俊 is a pretty explicitly male name. 
> 
> I took the liberty of giving her the character 俊 anyway, because it's 2020 and June deserves to have her coolness typified by her name.
> 
> * * *
> 
> Also, I'm friendlystrawberry on tumblr! Come say hi.


	3. Chapter 3

The tea tray was a strange, double-layered thing: a wide, shallow box with a row of closely-spaced parallel bars set into the lid. Sokka watched as the Fire Lord took his sweet time arranging the teaware. He set the teapot and the impossibly tiny teacups on their wooden tray in total silence, unstacking the teacups and flipping them the right way up. Then he reached for the metal tea canister and unscrewed the lid. He shook it in one hand, producing a dry rustling sound, and lifted it to his nose, closing his eyes as he inhaled. Finally, he dipped the bamboo tea scoop into the canister. The tea leaves murmured as he spooned them gently into the plain ceramic teapot.

Sokka picked discreetly at his fingernails. He’d never really gotten the hang of making tea; he drank it when it came with meals and meetings, but it normally ended up oversteeped and too bitter to really enjoy. In Zuko’s hands, the process looked so easy. Elegant. The universe was so unfair. 

Zuko picked up the plain kettle and set a hand underneath it, looking cool and dry as always even as the metal glowed red-hot. It was probably a firebender thing; just thinking about drinking tea made Sokka feel like a melting lump of wax. The kettle faded from a faint orange back to silver as Zuko poured the steaming water into the teapot.

“What am I doing in Ba Sing Se?” Zuko repeated Sokka’s question.

He poured the tea onto the top level of the tray, missing the teacups entirely. Sokka watched as the perfect stream of steaming liquid barely made a splash as it passed through the slits in the wood. _What the hell?_

“What are you _doing?_ ” Sokka gaped at the steam emanating from the wooden grate. “In Ba Sing Se, yes, but you just wasted some perfectly good tea!”

“I’m rinsing it,” Zuko said, raising an eyebrow at him, as if _rinsing tea_ was something perfectly normal and not a completely irrational thing to do. Tea was water! You didn’t rinse water! You _couldn’t_ rinse water!

… Had he been drinking dirty water the whole time?

“Is that something you need to do?”

“It depends on the kind of tea and where you are. For most teas in the Earth Kingdom, yes.”

Zuko refilled the teapot, then replaced the lid and settled himself in the chair to meet Sokka’s eyes, the line of his back a perfect bamboo rod. Sokka’s spine ached just watching him sit.

“But it’s not really a hygiene issue, just something that you do to make the tea taste better. Or so Uncle says.” Zuko’s lips quirked upwards, and he rolled his shoulders in a little shrug. “I just do it the way he tells me to.”

Sokka nodded. “And what are you doing in Ba Sing Se?”

“I’m on a sabbatical.”

“Are you allowed to take those?” Sokka had been under the impression that there were two types of rulers. Kuei’s type, where the ruler sat on the throne and pretended to rule while actually doing who-knows-what, and Zuko’s type, where every single decision had to pass through the Fire Lord’s hands before it could even begin to be considered.

Zuko shrugged. “My grandfather used to take six months off every year.”

Sokka was struck with a sudden, intense fury. The man who had terrorized multiple countries and destroyed so much of his family’s culture and history had done it all as a _part-time job_. Orchestrating cultural genocide and the plundering of natural resources in one half of the year, vacationing on Ember Island in the other.

Zuko misread the anger in his eyes. “Technically, this is the first time I’m taking a holiday since ascending to the throne. Uncle advised me to take up to half a year to relax. Said something about burnout.” He poured the tea, then gestured at the cups in an open invitation. “But I’m a firebender. It’s physically impossible for me to burn out.”

Sokka drank. The tea was mellow, slightly bitter, and _hot_. He felt tiny beads of sweat bead begin to form on his upper lip. “And how is relaxing so far?”

Zuko shrugged. “It’s been less than a full day, and I’ve already had to deal with a bounty hunter probably scaring the customers half to death.” He paused. “By the way, what are you doing here?”

Better to seize the moose-lion by its teeth. “Suki and I broke up.” It was the first time Sokka had said it out loud without the pleasant, protective haze of alcohol or poetry. Speaking the words shifted the thorn embedded deep inside his ribs and intensified the ache in his lungs. 

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Thanks."

Outside, a bird trilled in the heavy air. The sky had unhooked the sun from its perch high above the earth and was lowering it slowly, scattering shards of golden light across the garden. The gilded rays illuminated Zuko from behind, piercing through the sheet of his hair and lingering on his face. Even his mangled scar, which twisted the proportions of Zuko’s face and clouded his beauty, was lovely in this lighting.

Sokka felt the same bitter jealousy from earlier in the afternoon rise up like bile inside his throat. If he’d looked like Zuko, had a royal destiny like Zuko, would things have turned out differently?

“It gets better. I thought I would never recover after Mai dumped me.”

A joint in Sokka’s neck popped loudly as his head jerked up. “What?” He knew that he’d been out of the loop, but how had he missed something that big?

“On some days, I thought dying would be preferable. Unfortunately, our breakup seemed to be the catalyst for a six month dry spell when it came to assassination, so death was hard to come by.” 

Zuko’s laugh was small but oddly endearing. It made him seem more like the awkward, soliloquizing teenager Sokka remembered. 

“Sometimes I think Mai hunted down all the assassins just to spite me.”

Sokka thought that Zuko and Mai suited each other, both dramatic and brooding in the same way. He felt uncharitably pleased to hear that they didn’t work out. It was nice to think that some one as handsome, powerful, and noble as Zuko wasn’t immune to heartbreak.

“I didn’t know that,” Sokka said.

Zuko stopped mid-sip, lifting the rim of the ceramic teacup from his lips. “Well. It was years ago. Not too long after you settled on Kyoshi Island, I think.”

Sokka had been so busy creating a new life with Suki that he hadn’t spared much thought for people other than immediate family. He’d barely thought about Zuko at all, to be honest. Zuko was a lifelong ally and a good friend, but there hadn’t been anything keeping them together after they’d reached their shared goals and ended the war.

“I see,” Sokka said. He wasn’t sure what else to say, but Zuko didn’t seem too upset. He poured them both another cup, then refilled the teapot. The steam rising from the mouth of the pot diffused rapidly, tinging the air with a faint, sweet hint of cut grass.

“Sut why are you here? At the teashop, specifically?”

“Your uncle invited me, actually. Sent me a letter on a messenger hawk.” Sokka pushed up the sleeve of his robe and showed Zuko the scabs on his forearm. They were healing up nicely, but would probably leave some faint scars. 

“Huh.”

“Weird, right? Piandao told him about what happened, and I guess he felt like doing some community service. Saving the Earth Kingdom from the scourge of the drunken Water Tribe barbarian.”

Zuko frowned. “Have people been saying that?”

“Eh."

They’d said a lot worse, both to his face and when his back was turned. Over the past seven years of peace, there had been times Sokka wasn’t sure whether to laugh or scream. He knew that people wouldn’t always be receptive to strangers of a different nation, but it still sent anger roiling in his gut when they were so open about it, so unashamed.

He understood the animosity from people from the Fire Nation; they’d metabolized generations of propaganda. Strangely enough, Sokka had discovered that the most flattering opinions of Water Tribesmen came from people who had come across extremely sordid, anatomically inaccurate depictions in illicit literature. Even then, those people had made strange and uncomfortable assumptions not just about his body but about his culture and personality. It seemed like there were only two types of Water Tribesmen in the eyes of the Fire Nation: brutal beasts or noble savages.

But the Earth Kingdom attitudes were worse in a different way, and somehow more painful. Most people on Kyoshi Island had known him for long enough that he’d dispelled most of their strange ideas on his type of foreigner. But the rest of the Earth Kingdom, which had suffered in the same ways as the Poles, seemed to ignore their shared history of suffering under imperialism in favor of ostracization, distrust, and contempt.

They sat in silence, staring at the garden through the carved window screen. Sokka broke the stillness of the moment by reaching out for the teapot. The leaves had been steeping for a while, but at this point, the tea was little more than slightly colored water. He poured a third round of tea into Zuko’s half-empty cup, and his friend tapped two fingers gently on the table.

“What did Uncle want with you?”

“No idea.”

The clouds scudded frantically by as if fleeing alongside the conversation. _Pretty clouds,_ Sokka thought. _Fluffy_ , his mind supplied, the words ghosting along the edges of his subconscious.

Was talking with Zuko always this hard? Sokka didn’t remember having nearly as much trouble when they were young. Even when they were on opposite sides of the war, even when Sokka had focused all of his resentment and hatred on the lone figure of the grotesque, disfigured prince, he hadn’t felt tongue-tied when facing Zuko. There were always insults and triumphant exclamations to fall back on, then.

Now that he looked back on it, Sokka had never really had any real conversations with Zuko. Sure, they’d broken his dad and— 

They’d broken his dad out of jail, sure, but they hadn’t actually made that much small talk. Zuko had ended up a prisoner for basically the whole time, and talking to him then had felt a bit like playing a role in a play. They’d worked unbelievably well as a team, but only when they had a common goal.

And now their goals couldn’t possibly be more different. Zuko was the Fire Lord, guiding his people into a brighter future after the war. Sokka was washed-up reject, and his goals had slipped from his fingers like a thousand bubbles underwater.

“In any case, you just missed him.”

“Who?”

“Uncle. He left for Caldera City this morning. He won’t be back until next spring.”

Sokka stared. Iroh had invited him to the tea shop, then decided to just abandon him without a word? Why was he even in Ba Sing Se, then?

“Why?”

Zuko’s stance shifted, his back relaxing a few degrees. Bringing a hand up to his chin and pretending to stroke the sparse stubble sprouting across his jaw, he said in a creaky voice, “There are many things in life you cannot tame. The terrible winters in Ba Sing Se, for example. I would consider it a great personal favor if the Fire Lord himself would permit me to visit Caldera City to warm my bones this season.” His voice lost the creakiness. “Plus he’s going to be the the interim Fire Lord while I’m on vacation."

It was strangely charming, the way the Fire Lord’s nose suddenly wrinkled in disgust. “He also said, ‘the road to Caldera City is one strewn with flowers. Who could begrudge an old man an opportunity to know each flower intimately?’, which I’m refusing to think about.”

Sokka snorted. You had to hand it to the Dragon of the West. He had an appreciation for all sorts of things in life, and, more importantly, the lack of filter required to enjoy them to the fullest. He had no doubt that Zuko hated it, but Sokka admired Iroh’s positive attitude towards romance. He hoped that he would have even a fraction of Iroh’s luck with women when he was old and wrinkled.

Zuko’s back straightened again. “I think he has an ulterior motive. Uncle doesn’t get cold. And the last time he was in Caldera, he complained the whole time. But if it’s a White Lotus thing, it’s probably better to just leave him alone.”

Sokka nodded. The Order of the White Lotus had been secretive and mostly inactive during the war. Nowadays it felt like the old men were everywhere, trying to make up for lost time. And when you were facing down seven graying retirees with varying levels of patience and the combined firepower of a mint-condition battleship, you got out of the way quick or you got incinerated.

“So,” Zuko said, “you have two choices. You could head to Caldera City to meet him, or you could stay in Ba Sing Se and wait for him here.”

Sokka frowned. He had come to Ba Sing Se specifically to meet Iroh, but he hadn’t really made the choice; June had dragged him across half the continent unprompted. Traveling to meet Iroh had just been a distraction from the bigger problems in his life.

Caldera City or Ba Sing Se? 

He’d stayed with Suki in Caldera City for a while, while she was still guarding Zuko in the palace. Returning would trawl up memories that Sokka wasn’t sure he was ready to revisit. Suki’s favorite noodle shop, where she liked to go after a long shift. The training room in the palace where she trained on her off days, twisting through the air like a bird of prey. The familiar, darkened corridor that led to his bedroom in the guest wing of the palace. The fragrance of her hair.

The answer was simple, once he broke the equation down to its simplest parts. 

“I think I’ll stay here.”

Sokka had traveled from town to town for the last three months, never stopping in the same place for longer than the time it took to get over a hangover. He’d slipped a smile over his face the whole time, and for a while his fake cheer had helped him paper over the hole in his heart. But now, with an old friend who he hadn’t seen in years, Sokka felt the invisible pressure of performing geniality ease slowly. Being with Zuko, as awkward as it was, wasn’t that bad. Zuko had once looked only for the worst in him. Sokka didn’t have to put up a front.

“It’ll be nice to have a friend here,” the Fire Lord said.

The smile Zuko gave him was tentative but it suffused the room with warmth. Sokka felt an improbable flutter in his heart, like the gentle beating of a moth’s wings.

///

“I need to get back to the shop. Jin has a baby now, and she needs to go home.”

Zuko tugged at his sleeve, but Sokka twisted his fingers deeper into the fabric, probably leaving some oily finger residue and definitely creasing the hemline.

“No, no way, nope. I am not letting the Fire Lord go out like that!”

They stood at the front door of the little house, engaged in a high-stakes match of tug-of-war on the battleground of Zuko’s tunic. The sun was well on its way to setting, elongating the shadows of the trees and walls and granting the argument a suitably dramatic backdrop.

“What exactly is the problem? I’m appropriately dressed to watch the tea shop. Anyway, I didn’t bring any of the royal accessories with me.”

“It’s not about the tea shop,” Sokka snorted, shelving his newfound knowledge of royal accessories for a later date. He’d forgotten that Zuko could be denser than a catgator at the bottom of the Foggy Swamp. “You’re the Fire Lord! You can’t just walk into a random tea shop in Ba Sing Se!” His voice pitched upwards into a panicked whine.

_Get it together, voice. Why do you have to be so embarrassing at the worst times?_

"Actually, the public thinks I'm on Ember Island visiting my sister. Only three people in the Fire Nation, including Uncle, know I'm actually here," Zuko said, eyes creased in a good-humored smile behind his glasses. "So I _can_ just walk into a random tea shop. The Fire Lord, no relation to Lee, is on holiday on some island right now."

Sokka jabbed a finger at Zuko’s face. “Yeah, well, Lee looks exactly like the Fire Lord! The glasses don’t do a single thing!” As a teenager, Sokka had successfully tricked an entire Fire Nation school and battalion into believing that he was a middle-aged man. He liked to think he knew a thing or two about disguises, and Zuko’s flimsy attempt at subterfuge was just not cutting it. He hadn’t even bothered changing any of his mannerisms.

Zuko stopped tugging abruptly. Sokka won the battle, but wasn’t sure what to do with his sudden victory. Zuko, unbalanced by the lack of counterweight, pitched forwards into him. Sokka grunted at the collision of solid muscle into his decidedly soft side. 

Zuko just had to have it all, didn’t he? Title, money, brain, looks. And apparently, rock-hard biceps. Sokka pushed gently at his friend’s shoulders, righting him. He picked a long, loose strand of hair off Zuko’s shoulder and let it flutter to the ground.

“You worry too much.”

“Because you apparently don’t worry at all!”

Maybe not the brains, though, given the way this conversation was turning out. Still, three out of four was more than Sokka could personally ever hope for.

“Just come with me to the shop, and you’ll see what I mean.”

Sokka ground the soles of his feet into the wooden floor. “Absolutely not. Give me one good reason why you think going out, sans disguise, will work.”

“I’ve been here for a day and no one’s seen through it yet.”

“A day is nothing! That could be a statistical outlier for all you know!”

“Alright, then. How about this. If I told you that Kuei was working as a cook in Caldera City, would you believe me?”

Sokka had the sudden mental image of Kuei wearing the traditional Fire Nation robes. In his little delusion, the Earth King rushed to dump a metal spider of noodles into a bowl and completely missed the receptacle. Daydream-Bosco, wearing a baggy white tunic, dove to the floor and shoveled the glistening noodles into his mouth with his paws.

He scoffed. “Kuei? No. What would he be doing in the Fire Nation? Also, the guy’s weak as hell. There’s no way he could survive in the restaurant industry.”

Triumph spread across Zuko’s face, shining through his eyes and in his smile. It made him look confident and suave rather than deranged, and Sokka hated it.

“So if you told someone that Fire Lord Zuko was in Ba Sing Se, they would say…?”

“No!” Sokka insisted. He refused to be swayed by such a flimsy argument. “That might work for someone like Kuei, but not for you. No offense, but the scar is a dead giveaway.”

Zuko shrugged. “People get the scar wrong all the time. They never know which side it’s actually on.”

Sokka thought back to a night on Ember Island, in what felt like a lifetime ago. “I thought you would be a lot more bothered by it than you are.”

“The scar? People never know which side it’s on, and they make comments when they don’t think I can hear them. I would’ve gone crazy if I let it bother me.’

Sokka frowned. “But they know the Fire Lord has a scar on his face. And you look like you’re from the Fire Nation.”

Zuko sighed and finished putting his shoes on. “Our country ran rampant across the Earth Kingdom for a hundred years. You know there are plenty of mixed-looking Earth people, and plenty of those have burn scars. Just come and see, okay? No one thinks that Lee could possibly be the Fire Lord. The Fire Lord doesn’t wear glasses, for one thing."

Sokka crossed his hands, then let out an exaggerated huff. “I’m pulling you out of here the moment I think anyone’s figured it out.”

The Fire-Lord-in-disguise was already halfway through the garden. Sokka had to yank his shoes on, barely saving his face from tipping over onto the ground, then bolted to catch up. The crops in the garden rustled in laughter.

When he pulled up next to Zuko, panting, his friend barely spared him a glance. Zuko continued walking in smooth silence, not a hair out of place. Sokka, already sweating through his clothing in the late summer humidity, felt like a large, ungainly beast in human clothing. Like he was Bosco, and Zuko, in his glasses and Earth Kingdom clothes, was Kuei. Only Zuko was significantly more attractive and marginally less well-traveled.

They passed under the moon gate and into a wave of indistinct chatter. The courtyard of the tea shop was awash in the glow of sunset, the golden light reflecting off the white tile and dancing with the water of the fountain. Someone had set lightweight wooden chairs and tables in the courtyard while they were gone, and now the open-air space was full of customers enjoying their tea. Sokka counted at least five patrons sucking opaque tea out of tall glass cups using fat straws, which was definitely not a native Earth Kingdom thing. 

A couple sitting at the edge of the little square was exhibiting some truly disgusting behavior, using their fingers to seal the tops of their straws and lifting the trapped liquid in the straws out of the glasses. Sokka watched in horror as the young woman moved the straw towards the young man’s face, then dropped the liquid into his mouth. A few dark spheres popped out of the tube along with the tea.

Blissfully unaware of the affront to public decency occurring in his own courtyard, Zuko waved at the woman who was standing behind the counter in the main tearoom. She nodded in response, then disappeared somewhere into the back. Zuko steered Sokka towards an empty table and pushed him gently into a chair.

“Uncle’s been diversifying. He serves this truly terrible tea with little tapioca-starch balls that look just like frog eggs.” Zuko turned to follow Sokka’s gaze. The Fire Lord’s timing was serendipitous; the couple had stopped engaging in their horrific courtship ritual and were back to drinking like normal human beings.

“But do they _taste_ like frog eggs?” Sokka asked absently, mind reeling. 

Zuko laughed. “Let me get you a glass. On the house.” 

He stepped away from the table and disappeared for a few moments. Sokka watched the couple make moon eyes at each other, and thought about Suki. If she were here, she would have snorted at the couple, then turned around and shot the little bubbles at Sokka using the straw as a blowgun. Sokka could hear the sunburst sound of her laughter skirting around the edges of his memories. The daydream dissolved into a dull, painful haze.

The tea turned out to be milky-brown. Little black spheres swirled and tumbled like stars in a sped-up galaxy at the base of the glass when Sokka probed at them with the straw, which turned out to be a neat segment of a hollow reed. The bubbles didn’t clump together like frog eggs, he noticed, but instead bounced off each other, miniature clumps of hail in a storm. Zuko took a seat across the table and watched Sokka expectantly.

“They don’t look that much like frog eggs up close,” Sokka said.

They didn’t. Frog eggs were gelatinous and tended to glob together, and these bubbles were missing the telltale nuclei in the centers. He tried a sip. “Lee, are you kidding me? These are way better.” He bit down on one experimentally, smacking his lips. The tapioca balls were chewy, pleasantly sweet, and a little sticky on his teeth. The corners of Zuko’s lips wavered in confusion.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Lee.” Sokka took a huge slurp, savoring the smooth taste of the milk tea. “These don’t taste like frog eggs at all. The texture’s all off.”

“I… thought you were joking,” Zuko stared.

“Me? Joking? Come on, you know we were on the road for a long time.” Sokka wasn’t being entirely honest. They’d sometimes struggled to find enough to eat, but it had rarely gotten _that_ bad. 

The truth was that after Sokka got over the horror of having a mouth full of frozen wood frog, he realized that they actually tasted pretty good. From there, the path only led to one destination. And Sokka had always been an adventurous kind of guy. Katara had certainly never warmed up to the idea of trying frog eggs, not even when all they could find for dinner was berries. Sokka had once tried to sneak the eggs into the food by mixing them into rice on one of those berry diet days. He'd gotten an earful from both Katara and Aang. 

With a shake of his head, Zuko said, “I forgot how weird you are.” He poured himself a cup of tea, then leaned back on his chair, a spark drifting lazily out of his mouth and glimmering into the air. The temperature was cooling rapidly as twilight set in, and the little spark swam up into the sky for a moment before winking out in the crisp evening. Sokka's head whipped around frantically, but none of the customers seemed to be paying any attention to them.

The sun was well and truly on its way to roosting for the night. Sokka could see only a sliver of the rapidly sinking star, its crown peeking out past the strange, cobbled-together skyline of Ba Sing Se. Looking up at the sky, he was struck with a memory of the strange planetary calendar in Wan Shi Tong’s library. He had entered dates into the mechanical contraption and watched as the entire false ceiling in the room shifted. A long metal hoop had drawn itself across the entire ceiling, pushing the day away and pulling darkness behind it.

Being in the courtyard of the tea shop at the tail end of sunset felt a little bit like being back in that room, hearing the mechanical clicking of the great device as he watched the heavens shift. An invisible band stretched across the middle of the sky, herding the sun's flaring colors away from the deepening night. One side of the sky was a bouquet of vermillion and magenta, reflecting off the undersides of the soft clouds and weaving through the last few patches of bright blue. The other was a gradient of cool darkness, a muted azure that seeped into the deep, inky purple on the other side of the horizon.

Sokka stole a glance at Zuko, suddenly feeling small and lost under the vastness of the sky. The Fire Lord was angled away as he watched the sunset. Illuminated by the drowsing embers of the sun, the scar on his face bloomed softly into a camellia flower. Sitting there, half a world away from his home, Zuko looked like an ordinary man in his glasses and his simple clothing. Still and calm, as if he had no other plans than to exist in the twilight as it crossed into night. Could Sokka learn to live like that? To breathe in the quiet tranquility of the moment, burying it deep in his chest and scattering his own beauty back into the world?

As the invisible hoop drew the heavy drapes of night farther across the faraway ceiling, a long-forgotten cog inside Sokka’s chest, buried under the dust of seven years of memories and heartbreak, jolted to life.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> cw: violence, death of an unnamed character
> 
> translations of the Chinese lines in the fic are in the end notes!

No one even raised an eyebrow at Lee from the tea shop. There were plenty of women who stole glances at him, giggling with each other when his back was turned, but no one looked at him with anything other than vague pity or genuine attraction. It was unfair how everyone seemed to ignore Fire Lord-y he looked. The universe’s defiance of common sense made Sokka feel like an oversteeped pot of tea — dark, bitter, and astringent — and left him sulking in the corner of the tearoom the entire afternoon.

“You’re bothering the customers.”

Sokka shuffled his papers and frowned into his tea. He was just sitting in the corner, minding his own business, thank you very much. If the other patrons had a problem with him, that was their fault. It wasn’t like he was being disruptive. Sure, he had maybe glared at anyone who tried to sit within a five meter radius of him, and maybe grumbled menacingly under his breath, but he wasn’t _loud_ or _odorous_. He was clean, dressed appropriately, and minded his own business. What was the problem?

Zuko was the problem. The stupid pair of glasses that somehow obscured his identity while covering nothing at all was the problem.

“Lee,” Sokka began, staring Zuko down with the obstinance of an old buffalo yak in the dead of winter. He was determined to come out of the conversation victorious.

“Yes, Sokka.”

“Has anyone looked at you weirdly this morning?"

Zuko sighed. Instead of answering the question, he said, “I’m this close to kicking you out entirely. You don’t need three tables worth of space, and you certainly haven’t paid for this much legroom.”

“I’m just saying, you look extremely suspicious,” Sokka whisper-shouted.

The customers closest to them, two tables away, frowned and turned in their direction. The pair of older men, one short and one long, was just barely out of Sokka’s little zone of privacy and had clearly been eavesdropping the entire time. The squat one shifted in his chair, scraping it against the floor as he shuffled his robes.

“Lee, is this… ruffian bothering you?”

Sokka shot him an affronted glare. He was the Avatar’s companion, the Fire Lord’s friend, and the son of the Water Tribe chief, thank you very much. Ruffian or not, he was still a paying customer. This man was just plain rude.

Zuko smiled gracefully at the short man. “It’s alright, Tu,” he said, tone slipping into something conciliatory and, in Sokka’s opinion, entirely unbecoming of the Fire Lord. “Sokka’s an honored guest.”

Sokka snorted. If Zuko really threatened and bullied all his honored guests into taking up less space, Sokka would go and catch a skunkfish by the tail.

The two men were still glaring, though, so Sokka coughed, straightened his back, and smoothed out his clothing. Zuko’s expression settled into annoyance when he looked back at Sokka.

“Sokka, please stop glaring at everyone. Jin will be here in an hour, and I’ll be done for the day. Then we can talk about whatever’s bothering you.”

Sokka sighed. He didn’t want to talk about it. He wanted to sulk at how cosmically unfair it was that Zuko was handsome, talented, stinking rich, and able to go completely incognito in a foreign nation despite possessing a glaring facial feature that screamed “Fire Lord”. 

Privately, Sokka vowed to sabotage the next three of Zuko’s romantic relationships. Let him live how the commoners lived.

“Look, there’s a festival going on in the Lower Ring today. You probably need the change of pace. Let’s go together,” Zuko said as he leaned closer and picked Sokka’s tea set up.

Sokka frowned, lowering his voice and looking suspiciously at Tu and his tall companion. They glared back at him. “I don’t know. It seems risky for you to go out somewhere with even more people.”

“No one knows what I look like, Sokka. Also, The Fire Lord wouldn’t be seen dead in the Lower Ring.” Zuko leaned closer, his voice almost inaudible. Sokka shivered. He could almost feel Zuko’s breath breeze past his neck, like the phantom touch of fingertips. Being in such close quarters with another person was almost unbearable.

“Fine,” Sokka said, mostly to get Zuko out of his personal space.

Zuko smiled softly at him, eyes crinkling around the edges, and Sokka once again cursed whatever spirit of fate had made his friend’s wrinkles look like _that_ and decided not to extend the same courtesy to Sokka. As Zuko looked at him, eyes bright even through the glare off his lenses, Sokka could feel the phantom glow of baijiu spreading through his cheeks and burning down his throat. 

Katara had warned him years ago about drinking too much, about alcohol dependency and withdrawal, but he hadn’t listened, and now he was paying the price. Apparently, skipping his usual nightly routine of downing as many liters as his body could take and passing out was causing strange reactions in his body. Heart palpitations, sweating, nausea. His tongue was heavy and dry in his mouth. But he would sooner throw himself into the gaping maw of a dolphin piranha than embarrass himself in front of the Fire Lord, so he would have to pass on the alcohol for now. If he played his cards right, maybe he could sneak some later and not look like an absolute drunkard.

Sokka sighed and looked down at the papers strewn across the table, at the strokes and hooks of the characters splashed across the pages. He forced his body to calm down as Zuko turned away to attend to another table. Then he picked his brush up and turned back to the poem in front of him, scrutinizing the messy lines of characters. If he couldn’t drink, he sure as hell was going to write.

Underneath his brush, a poem began to form.

花间一壶酒，独酌无相亲

The Fire Lord was walking around the market streets of the Lower Ring and _no one_ had said a word in the two hours they’d been at the festival. Plenty of tipsy, flirting couples had bumped into him and looked directly into his face to apologize, but every apology had been delivered in a regular way, not in a falling-over-in-supplication way. Not a single one of them seemed to have noticed that they’d committed a capital offense.

 _Maybe they were too absorbed in each other to notice the Fire Lord in the flesh,_ Sokka thought bitterly. He brought his skewer of hawthorn berries to his mouth and crunched at the hard candy coating. It cracked in a spiderwebbing pattern under the pressure of his teeth.

Between the two of them, they’d already consumed four egg custard steamed buns, two platters of fermented tofu, and ten cumin-spiced lamb skewers, and were well on the way to doubling the skewer count when Sokka spotted the craftsman sitting at his stool.

Sokka opened his mouth to call Zuko over, but cut himself off just in time. _Get it together, Sokka. At this point Zuko won’t have to do anything to blow his cover, with you yelling his name for the entire Lower Ring to hear._ “Lee! Come and look at this!”

The tarp laid at the man’s feet wasn’t very impressive. Just a pair of scissors, a little tray of colored glass beads, and collection of strange, thick blades of grass. Nothing particularly special, except for what was arranged in front of his supplies — little plaited creatures, all made of the grass. A snakelike dragon the height of his knee, a strutting possum chicken, and an assortment of smaller insects: butterflies, mantises, grasshoppers, dragonflies.

Watching the craftsman work was like watching magic in action, more enchanting than any bending Sokka had ever seen. Bending was showy and impressive, yes, but nothing compared to watching an artisan work on such an intimate scale. The closest he’d seen to something this breathtaking was watching Toph fiddle with her little chunk of meteorite, coaxing it from solid to liquid and back in a state of constant transfiguration.

“What are those grasses?” Sokka asked.

“Leaflets from a palm frond.” The craftsman twisted a handful of leaves together in a swift, expert motion, braiding them together and cutting away parts of the shape. Sokka watched, spellbound, as a pair of wings formed. Within the span of thirty seconds, a butterfly with feather-light antennas and blue glass eyes was dangling from one end of a long, supple reed.

“Watching is free,” the man said. “But buying is even better. They’ll dry out over the next few days and you can put them out as decoration.” 

“How much are they?” Zuko asked, crouching down and eyeing the figures on the floor.

“Seven copper pieces for the small bugs. Twenty for a chicken, and a silver piece for the dragon. That one takes a day, so if you want one, you’ll have to place an order and I’ll have it delivered to your place of residence.”

“We’ll take a butterfly,” said Sokka. “Can I have the one you just made?”

The man held it out as Sokka fished for the coins. 

Sokka bounced his newly-acquired butterfly by its reed, watching it glide through the air as they meandered through the streets. It flittered and wove through the crowd, chasing after some undetectable scent.

They stopped at a roadside cart with a collection of literature. The cart was small but stuffed to the brim, with piles of scrolls and dusty stacks of bound volumes ten books deep. The merchant had divided his wares into two sections of literature and poetry and arranged them by date of publication.

As Zuko began sifting through the fiction section, Sokka poked suspiciously through the bound volumes of poetry, carefully lifting each book off its stack and checking the volumes underneath. He saw plenty of clear forgeries of more famous works, but no printed versions of his own. Once he completed his check, he moved on to the bundles of scrolls. He didn’t see any of the blue-mounted scrolls that he thief had printed his poetry on, and for a stupid moment, Sokka was bitter that his poems weren’t popular enough to have spread to Ba Sing Se yet.

A cockroach skittered by their shoes. Sokka lifted a foot and crushed it under his heel like one of his traitorous thoughts.

Evening was falling as they left the cart of books empty-handed and headed for a food stand. The bustling, sprawling organism of the festival seemed to be getting bigger and friskier as the hours wore on. When they’d entered the Lower Ring in the late afternoon, the festival had only taken up four streets, starting at the south gate and ending at the Firelight Fountain. Now, there was no definitive start or end to the festival; people were selling food and trinkets out of their houses, and traveling vendors parked their carts on the sides of the traffic and set up makeshift stalls. 

They sat down at one of the large rectangular tables set out in the Firelight Fountain square with a bottle of plum wine and a platter of roasted meat and dipping sauces, artfully arranged on a bed of herbs. Sokka uncorked the bottle and poured a generous glug into Zuko’s cup, then allowed a tiny dribble into his own. He would prove himself here if it was the last thing he did.

“Have you come to this festival before?” Sokka asked, using a piece of lettuce to shovel salty-sweet chunks of pork into his mouth and pointedly ignoring the wine bottle.

“No,” Zuko admitted. “I only knew about it because Uncle told me. He kept dropping hints about it, saying that it was a shame that Jin was married.”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“I came here, to the Firelight Fountain once,” Zuko said, sipping on his drink, “on a date. With her.”

“And?”

“Well, this is the festival of Oma and Shu. It’s supposed to be romantic, you know.” That explained all the couples walking around, then. Watching the Fire Lord take a slow sip of his wine, Sokka wished the happy festival-goers would all just spontaneously combust. The sharp, cool aroma of the plum liquor wafted towards him and sent shivers crawling up and down his body. He reached out and capped the bottle.

“Ooh.” Sokka said, mostly to distract himself. “But now she’s married. So you brought me instead as your backup date. So romantic.” He faked a swoon, then reached across and grabbed Zuko’s hand with his own oily, food-stained one. “Oh, Lee, you make me feel _so_ special.”

Zuko looked at him quietly, an oddly calm expression on his face. After a few heartbeats, Sokka released his hand like it was one of Momo’s droppings. Teasing the Fire Lord was no fun if it didn’t work.

Above them, in the second and third story apartments shading the narrow streets, residents were opening their windows up to the smoky sky. Sokka watched as people tossed coils of rope between the apartments, creating a sort of crisscrossing web across the sky. They leaned out of their windows and carefully hooked lit paper lanterns on the rope. If he squinted, Sokka thought it was like looking up into a night sky where the stars were falling gently like leaves on the wind.

They’d had trouble locating the general area of the festival in the early afternoon, but now, Sokka realized, latecomers could reach it just by following the light of the lanterns, illuminating the dark. 

“The people in Ba Sing Se believe that stringing up the lanterns pays homage to the legendary lovers, Oma and Shu, and the luminous cave spiders that lit their way in Oma’s underground tunnels. The lanterns are supposed to represent the spiders, and the more you hang, the stronger your love will be.” Zuko said, following Sokka’s gaze to look at the swaying lanterns in their narrow strip of darkness.

It was a beautiful sentiment, but Sokka thought they’d gotten the story a little twisted. He’d experienced the tunnels of Omashu, and it had not been a romantic experience. He certainly hadn’t run into any bioluminescent cave spiders (which was in itself a horrifying thought), only a group of off-key traveling singers and a terrifying pack of badgermoles.

Aang had told him that about the tomb inside the tunnels, and the inscription, “Love is brightest in the dark”. The spirit of the lantern-lighting seemed a little counterintuitive to the whole sentiment, but maybe the people of Ba Sing Se were just enthusiastically clueless.

The pair of friends sat in silence, watching the residents hook their lanterns to the rope. They winced in unison, as one lady, leaning halfway out of her third story window, almost dropped the lit lantern she was trying to hang on the middle of the street. In the back of his mind, Sokka calculated the chance of a potential fire disaster happening over the course of the festival. The odds did not look good.

Two men came and sat down at their table, nodding at them in greeting. The man sitting next to Zuko, who sported a truly impressive beard, set their infant next to Zuko on the wooden bench. It gurgled wetly, reaching fingers out to pull at the Fire Lord’s robe.

Didn’t these fathers teach their child basic manners? It was almost as if they were totally fine with having their baby lose a hand or two. Sokka watched in horror as the baby drooled all over the Fire Lord’s sleeve.

Sokka stared surreptitiously but couldn’t figure out the child’s age or gender. It was wearing what seemed to be the standard dress for Earth Kingdom children under the age of four: a square of fabric covering its front, some loose trousers, and thin sandals. Its hair rose in wisps from a hairline that looked rather like the textbook example of male-pattern baldness. 

“Cute baby,” said Zuko. “How old is he?”

“She,” the beardless man corrected. “She turned one last month.”

“Congratulations on your auspicious milestone,” Zuko said, looking earnestly into the baby’s face. He maintained eye contact with the child even as he directed his next words to Sokka. “Sokka, pass me the butterfly.”

The child’s garbled cooing intensified as Zuko swung the butterfly in front of her face. It reminded Sokka of the time Suki had borrowed his fishing rod to play with a catfish. Sokka had just about lost his mind trying to figure out where his fishing supplies were when he saw Suki using his fishing rod to jiggle a little lure in front of the catfish’s face, laughing as the it reared up out of the water and batted at the air. 

It was a painful memory. He’d been so worked up about the disappearance of his fishing rod that he hadn’t stopped to appreciate Suki’s playfulness, or how cute she was on her days off. They’d spent the rest of that afternoon giving each other the cold shoulder after another screaming match.

“Sokka?” Zuko asked, his eyebrows furrowed. “Everything alright with you over there?”

“It’s nothing,” Sokka said, shaking the memory away. “I just forgot how good you were with kids,” Sokka said, propping his chin up on his palm, fingers itching for the wine. Zuko stared at him for a moment, then nodded and continued shaking the stem of the reed around, flapping the plaited grass butterfly through the air. The baby cooed in delight, reaching out to grab a wing. The toy dodged her chubby hands and fluttered to rest on her nose for a moment. She went cross-eyed and smacked at it with her wrist, drool leaking over her chin.

The Fire Lord threw his head back and laughed as the butterfly lifted off on an invisible breeze. The sound, so joyful and unexpected, echoed in Sokka’s ears and through the dull ache of his heart. 

举杯邀明月，对影成三人

Zuko was pleasantly, sleepily drunk when Sokka decided that it was time to go home. The two fathers and their baby had excused themselves almost thirty minutes ago, and the child had cried when Zuko leaned over to wave goodbye at her.

Sokka stood up and cursed his own foolishness. He’d allowed himself to get swept away by the cheery atmosphere of the festival, and the few sips of alcohol he’d allowed himself had been cushioned by the meat and custard buns sludging in his stomach. He was barely drunk at all, instead feeling entirely awake and uncomfortably paranoid.

“Lee,” he said, shaking the drowsing man at the table. “Time to go home.”

Zuko stirred, then picked his head up from his forearms. “Okay,” he said, without argument. He got up and took the water that Sokka offered, downing it in one go. Zuko’s face was deep red, and a little puffier than usual, but both his speech and gait were steady.

They headed in the general direction of the monorail station, zigzagging against the flow of the crowd. Sokka found himself holding Zuko’s wrist. The Fire Lord didn’t _seem_ that drunk, but it was better to be safe than sorry. If they were physically attached to each other, then he wouldn’t have to worry about losing Zuko and maybe being entirely responsible for the collapse of the Fire Nation.

Zuko’s wrist was solid and warm, and his skin was so smooth.

“Hang on,” Zuko said. 

Sokka skidded to a stop, but Zuko had already pulled his hand out of his grip. Sokka whirled around, mouth open to complain, and froze. Zuko had disappeared.

He fought down the instinctive rush of panic and nausea. His friend was slightly tipsy and couldn’t have gone far. _Deep breaths,_ Sokka reminded himself. _Just look around slowly and carefully. Look for a man with long hair and glasses._ Almost instantly, Sokka’s gaze lighted on Zuko, illuminated by the soft glow of the lanterns.

He had doubled back and was half a street away, looking at some trinkets at a jewelry stand. Sokka tossed the last half of a lamb skewer into a convenient trash can and ran to meet him.

Zuko was holding a pendant to the light, rotating it this way and that way as he stared at the metal surface, which was embossed with a motif of flowers and birds. There was a cord looped and braided through a square hole, and a tassel attached to the bottom of the medallion. The simple brass disk fit in Zuko’s palm nicely, the tassel dangling loosely in the air. 

Sokka’s jaw slackened. The last time he had seen the token, it had been in June’s hand. She’d let him hold it and had basically threatened his life if he lost it. What was it doing here?

“Shopping for a present for your sweetheart?” The man asked. “Women love jewelry.”

“Where did you get it?” Zuko asked the vendor, his voice curious and casual. Like he was a buyer trying to gauge the worth of a cheap piece of jewelry, rather than the Fire Lord with pockets deeper than the Mo Ce Sea, holding an extremely suspicious item.

“A traveling merchant sold it to me,” The vendor was a round-faced man with big, honest eyes. “Do you like it? The workmanship is very impressive. It’s the finest thing I have to offer by far.”

Sokka looked over Zuko’s shoulder. He nudged Zuko’s hand and bent over to get a closer look.

The sparrows on their plum branches were there, just as he remembered. He scanned the token until he found June’s name, hidden in the same place. But there was something subtly wrong about this token.

June’s tassel had been fine silk that shimmered and flowed across his palm. This one was a much duller cotton, hanging limply from the base of the medallion. The metal of the token itself shone under the light of the festival lanterns, but Sokka could see that the deeper crevices in the embossing were beginning to tarnish.

“How much for it?” Zuko asked.

“Well, the craftsmanship is very fine,” the man said, then winked. “Guaranteed to charm any girl you’re trying to impress. You can thank me at your wedding.”

Zuko hummed. The peddler interpreted his expression as hesitation and hastily added, “And the merchant assured me that it was as good as official documentation when it comes to entering Ba Sing Se. A perfect gift that combines form and function.”

Sokka saw Zuko’s head jerk up at the edge of his vision. The man smiled genially, but the sharpness in his eyes knew that he’d hooked them.

“Come on, man,” Sokka cut in, hoping that his tone came across as haggling and not suspicious. “You can’t expect us to believe that.” He ran a hand over some of the other items for display, trying to calm his urge to fidget. There were plenty of little metal figurines and hammered silver jewelry on the stands, but nothing else was as fine as the token the man was trying to sell as a pendant.

“It’s true,” the man said. “I tried it myself,” he added.

Sokka stared. “You’re shitting me. They just let you in?”

“I’m here, arent I?” the man asked. “I tried it at the Outer Wall and on the rail system. The guards at the gate looked pretty nervous, actually.”

“Hm.” Sokka grunted.

“If you’re interested, I’ll sell it to you for one gold piece.”

Zuko reached into his robes. The peddler’s eyes tracked the movement.

“One gold piece for a cheap piece of brass and an unsubstantiated claim?” Sokka asked incredulously, stepping in front of Zuko and cutting his motion off. 

“One gold coin for a beautiful piece of work worthy of any noblewoman’s neck,” the man said, “and a passport into the city.”

“I won’t argue on its beauty, but you can’t expect anyone to buy your story.” A gold coin had been enough to feed Sokka and Suki’s little household for half a year. There was no way anything this man was selling at his stall was anywhere nice enough to warrant that much money.

The man sighed. “One gold piece, and I’ll throw in one extra thing from the display for free, as a gesture of goodwill.”

“Done,” Zuko said, cutting into the conversation.

Sokka whirled around, indignant. “Lee! You can’t just take that offer!”

“I already have. Sokka, which of these do you like?” Zuko dropped the coin into the peddler’s outstretched palm, and waved his other hand at the bracelets hanging from a wooden dowel.

“That one,” Sokka said automatically, pointing at a wide, hammered bangle with enameled blue and green waves rolling along the sides. It had caught his attention the moment he saw it. “But that’s not the point!”

The vendor was already wrapping up the bracelet in a square piece of printed linen. “Thanks for your business,” he said, cheerily, dropping the parcel in Sokka’s hand. “Come again!”

Sokka spluttered as Zuko pocketed the medallion, spun on his heel, and strolled away. It felt like half of Sokka’s interactions with Zuko so far had involved running to catch up to the Fire Lord. Like some warped reversal of their first meetings. Sokka’s good cheer from the earlier part of the festival evaporated. 

“You can’t fold that early in! He would have sold to us for a third of the offering price if you just let me work my magic. Lee, I swear, sometimes you have no sense when it comes to money.”

“I didn’t want to sit around watching you argue for half an hour, Sokka. We have better things to do. I have enough money, anyway, and it’s good to support the local economy.”

Zuko’s voice lowered. “There’s something I need to tell you about the pendant. We’ll talk at home.”

Sokka nodded, then swung an arm around Zuko’s shoulders in an exaggerated gesture of friendliness. Best not to look suspicious. And this way, the Fire Lord wouldn’t be able to get away from him so easily.

As they made it further from the festivities, the festival atmosphere began to change. The center of the festival had been rowdy and loud, with revelers cheering and drinking in the streets. The closer they got to the monorail station, the tamer the festivities became. They walked through street after street filled with families roasting meat over makeshift charcoal grills, their sleepy children dozing just inside the open doors of their homes.

They were walking down a deserted alley, a few twists and turns away from the monorail, when Sokka caught a flash of shining metal out of the corner of his eye. Acting on instinct more than anything else, Sokka pushed Zuko down by the shoulders, thanking any spirits listening that Zuko was relaxed enough, and flexible enough, that he went down without complaint. 

“What was that for?” Zuko grumbled, glaring up at Sokka from under heavy eyebrows. His cheeks were tinged a faint pink.

“Sorry, force of habit. Suki trained that into me,” Sokka said. It was true. Ducking at even the briefest glimpse of metal in motion was an occupational hazard of being a part-time assistant to the entire battalion of Kyoshi Warriors. Distantly, Sokka’s brain registered that talking about this little detail about Suki didn’t hurt as much as he thought it would. Maybe it was the general atmosphere of the festival, or the presence of his friend.

They straightened up. Sokka tugged at Zuko’s clothes to neaten them, brushing the wrinkles out of his robe. He turned back towards the end of the alley, then spotted the knife quivering in the plaster wall.

He choked.

Zuko surged up in an instant, plucking the knife out of the wall and throwing it at the mouth of the alley. Sokka heard the point of impact, a muffled thunk, and an agonized grunt. He turned just in time to watch a man crumple to the ground, the hilt of the knife protruding from the lower left side of his ribs.

“Zuko,” he shrieked. He wasn’t sure what else to say.

Zuko rushed at the man and bent over his crumpled figure, his hands shimmering in a pulsing, dark green fire. He placed them directly over the man’s throat. In the light, his scar was a rippling, ominous ghost.

“Start talking,” he hissed, voice cold and steady, “and we’ll make sure you wake up at a healer’s clinic. Sokka, watch my back.”

“Damn,” Sokka said, “you really don’t mess around.” He turned and drew his boomerang, scanning the area.

In the earlier years of his rule, the young Fire Lord had locked assassins and _his own homicidal father_ away instead of doing what Sokka thought was the sensible thing and offing them for once and for all. And now the same Fire Lord was holding a potential assassin’s life hostage. It reminded Sokka of the good old days, when Zuko hadn’t had any second thoughts about stealing personal belongings, burning down villages, and holding the Avatar hostage. 

The man laughed wetly and drew the dagger from his own chest. Sokka heard rather than saw it: the sharp splatter of blood, like raindrops against oilcloth.

“Talk,” Zuko said. “There’s still time to cauterize the wound, even if you’re trying to sign your own death warrant.”

 _“Talk,”_ the Fire Lord repeated, voice commanding. 

There was a long silence, punctuated only by three sets of breathing. Sokka’s, quick and shallow. Zuko’s, steady and deep. And the dying man’s, his breath becoming more erratic and fading slowly and finally rattling out.

“He’s dead,” Zuko said. Sokka turned, but kept his boomerang out just in case.

He was definitely dead. Sokka looked at Zuko, standing there with a stranger’s blood splattered across his robe, and back to the body on the ground. A deep puddle of darkness was beginning to form underneath the corpse, some of it seeping into the cracks between the cobblestones.

Sokka wanted to scream. But screaming would definitely call more attention to them and make things a thousand times worse, so he suppressed his urge in favor of something milder. Something that wouldn’t bring half the block running to them. Something that would fit right in to the general atmosphere of the festival. Something he wouldn’t regret later.

“What a romantic night,” he said. “Really glad we came together.”

“Mmhmm,” said Zuko. “Now help me search the body. If we’re lucky, there’ll be some form of identification.”

While Zuko patted through the folds of the corpse’s robe, Sokka patted the pockets. His searching fingers found a strange, lumpy shape. He wriggled it out of the man’s clothing. It was a thick coin purse, lined with multiple layers of fabric and hefty with the weight of metal.

“Here,” he said, passing it to Zuko. He continued patting the body down, then rolled it over with a grunt and checked the cadaver. Nothing. He turned the body back onto its back and opened the mouth just in case, using the blunt tip of his boomerang to manipulate the man's tongue. Nothing under the tongue or in the back of the throat. He wiped the boomerang off on the dead man's clothes, then straightened up and looked at Zuko.

“Let’s see what we’ve got.”

“Let’s check the purse first, then see what this scroll says. I found it in his robe.” Zuko tucked the small scroll under his arm, then passed the purse back to Sokka, summoning flames to one hand and casting light through the darkness of the alley.

Sokka pulled the drawstring and dumped the contents of the purse onto his hands. What he thought were coins turned out to be something else: five tassel-adorned medallions, all stamped with a plum blossom motif and the crammed rooftops of Ba Sing Se.

“Shit,” Zuko whispered.

Sokka replaced the tokens in the purse and tucked them into his own robes. They exchanged a wordless glance and silently agreed to discuss it later.

“The scroll?” Sokka asked, plucking it from where it was wedged between Zuko’s arm and side.

Zuko unfurled the blue-mounted scroll, revealing familiar characters printed in an unfamiliar hand. 

香亦竟不灭，

人亦竟不来。

相思黄叶落，

白露湿青苔。

“Shit,” Sokka whispered.

He’d written that poem for Suki in the first week after he had moved out. He’d stayed sleepless for days, laying in rented bedrooms and staring up at unfamiliar ceilings. One time, the bedsheets in the seedy room he rented for the night had smelled like the fragrant, floral oil she’d used on special occasions. Sokka had scrambled out of the bed and thrown up in that room, then escaped out the window.

That night, he’d stolen wine from a local bar and gotten drunk in some farmer’s rice field, talking to Yue and composing that poem. Seeing his heart splayed across creamy white paper, entirely out of context, sent a fresh lance of pain through his chest.

Sokka gave in to his urge to shriek.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> On the Chinese characters in this chapter:
> 
> All of these are lines from poems by Li Bai, an extremely influential Chinese poet in the 700s (yes, 700 AD!). He was an undisputed master of the poetry conventions of his time, and his work is considered an important part of Chinese literary canon, to the point that almost everyone who received a Chinese-language education can recite at least one or two of his poems by heart. His most famous poem is arguably 靜夜思, or "Quiet Night Thought", a quatrain about moonlight and homesickness. If you're curious, there are plenty of translations floating around the internet.
> 
> * * *
> 
> All of Sokka's poems in this fic are borrowed from Li Bai's work. I had planned to use his poetry as a kind of springboard for Sokka's work from the beginning — Li Bai was famous for writing poems about alcohol and nostalgia, and he references the moon a LOT. A perfect fit for this drunken poet version of Sokka. I waffled a bit on translating them into English for the fic, but nothing I wrote came close, so I just used the originals. Following are some very loose translations for the poems used.
> 
> The poem in the line breaks is from 月下独酌四首, "pouring wine alone with the moon (four poems)":  
>   
> I poured wine alone from a pot among the flowers.  
> I raised my cup and asked the moon to bring my shadow to make us three.
> 
> The poem in the scroll is from 长相思, "endless yearning", from a section about an empty bed three years after the end of a relationship:  
>   
> The incense has dissipated but still lingers,  
> The woman is gone.  
> Yearning yellows the falling leaves,  
> White dewdrops on green moss.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chinese character translations are in the end notes.

Dawn had barely broken when Sokka threw his covers off, pulled a robe over his bare torso, and leaped up the stairs to knock at Zuko’s door. There was a moment of sullen stillness before the door wrenched itself open to reveal a messy room. Zuko was standing shirtless in the doorway, hair twisted in a thick hank and draped over his shoulder like seaweed. 

Sokka ignored his friend’s state of half-nakedness and edged around him into the room, staring silently at the mess on the floor. The bed by the window was strewn with pillows and rumpled bed sheets, and what looked like a month’s worth of clothes was littered across the ground. Sokka wasn’t sure if he had ever owned this many clothes in his life, total, including the four sets of hand-me-down sealskin baby clothes the entire tribe cycled through. And here he was in Ba Sing Se, staring at a fortune of silks and linens in shades of cinnabar and viridian dumped carelessly across the floor.

“What are you doing here so early?” Zuko asked, voice cool and calm, as if a foreign barbarian hadn’t just thrust himself into his private quarters and was now gawking at his dirty laundry. “I thought you liked sleeping in.”

Sokka shrugged, ignoring the way the early morning light melted like sugar on Zuko’s skin. How was it possible that a firebender who drew his power from the sun didn’t have a single tan line on his body? His skin was the color of sesame all the way down. “Got antsy. Figured we could check the damage on your robe, maybe wash the blood out. Where is it?”

Zuko shrugged and gestured vaguely at the floor, then headed towards the chair and desk in the corner of his room. He bent fluidly at the waist to pick up a discarded tunic as he went, then slipped the wrinkled garment over his head before sitting down, watching with a vague, detached interest as Sokka stalked through his room, as if Sokka was just a faceless servant picking through his discards.

“I know it’s not big compared to what you’re used to, but Iroh’s house is actually pretty nice.” Sokka said. He plucked a pair of trousers from the ground and frowned. He didn’t say that Zuko’s bedroom was almost the size of Suki’s entire house on Kyoshi Island. “There’s no reason to leave the place this messy.”

“Oh. It’s not that bad,” said Zuko. He stretched his legs from the chair, pointing his toes like a cat deer, and kicked the clothes closest to him into a pile by the wall, clearing a little half-circle of floor around himself. “There, is that better?”

Sokka felt his entire body tense up, the tendons in his leg aching and his grip tightening on the fabric of Zuko’s discarded pants. Was it possible that the Fire Lord was secretly... a slob? He stared at the creased sheet on the bed, willing his shoulders to relax. His hindbrain screamed at him to write a letter to Suki and find out if she’d known about this - this affront to common decency.

“Iroh has a basket for dirty clothes somewhere, doesn’t he?”

Zuko shrugged and pointed at a beautiful lacquered wooden box with sinuous green dragons inlaid along the top edges. Sokka lifted the lid and was unsurprised to find it empty, the shadows inside yawning at him as he peered in. He shook his head and dumped the pile of clothes into the box, wrinkling his nose as he sneezed. The bundle met the box with a whump, and golden motes of dust plumed into the dawn air, lazy as molasses.

“It’s right there. Why haven’t you been using it?” It was barely six in the morning, and already Sokka felt the stirring of a headache pinching at the space behind his eyebrows.

“Was I supposed to?”

Sokka began sorting through the clothes on the floor. Bewildered anger rushed through his veins, and his fingers itched to rip through a fine emerald tunic, the silk smooth and slippery to the touch. “How else are you going to do your laundry?”

He rummaged through the heap closest to Zuko’s bed. Another pair of pants. A cloth belt. The blood-splattered robe from last night, which Sokka examined with a critical eye. It would be salvageable with a little bit of work. 

A white pair of Fire Nation underwear, its ties loose, crumpled at the very bottom of the pile. Sokka’s face puckered as he shoved it back into the bloodied robe, rolling it up and thinking of anything but the _Fire Lord’s freshly-shucked underpants._ Everyone wore underpants. The Avatar wore underpants. _Don’t make this weird, Sokka._

 _—_ in fact, it was far more sanitary to wear underpants than to go without, so the Fire Lord really did have his priorities straight, in a manner of speaking. Good job, Fire Lord!

“Was I supposed to do the laundry?” Zuko’s oblivious voice interrupted his horrible train of thought, and Sokka was almost thankful for the distraction until his brain processed the statement.

“Zuko,” Sokka paused for a long moment. He started again. “Zuko, what?”

“Is that a thing real people do? Laundry?”

“How— how. What do you mean, _real people_? How have you been living this whole time?!”

“Like this?”

Sokka stared for a moment, then dumped the last bundle of clothes into the laundry basket. The suspicious robe-bundle sat at the very top, entirely absurd for the situation, taunting him with its hidden artifact of mortification. It was the way that Zuko was so fucking _casual_ about it — about _“this”_ , whatever he meant by that. 

“I mean, in the palace? You can’t tell me the fancy Fire Lord chambers are like this.” Sokka remembered the only time he’d seen Zuko’s rooms. They had all gotten drunk in Zuko’s bedroom after his coronation, before everyone split up. The room had been excessively wide and empty with nothing but a large bed in the center, and they’d all piled in after Aang had jumped straight onto it. He imagined that room, its beautifully smooth wooden floors covered in meters of week-old crinkled robes and scrolls, and swallowed the wave of disgust rising in his throat. “Is that why Mai broke up with you?”

He regretted the words as soon as they came out, but didn’t have any time to apologize before Zuko responded:

“Actually, Mai’s worse.”

Sokka retracted his regrets. “How can anyone be worse?! How did you not suffocate under a pile of your own trash?”

“The servants pick up everything.”

“The servants.” Sokka felt unreasonably incredulous. Of course the Fire Lord had servants. He should have known that Zuko’s life as the Fire Lord was different from his regular old peasant life. Somehow, he’d managed to forget that his friend was one of the richest, most powerful men in the four nations.

Zuko mistook his expression for confusion. “You know, the maids? The people who clean.” 

“I can speak the common tongue just fine, Zuko. You make the maids pick up your clothes? What about like, the ones that you spar in? The sweaty ones?”

“It’s their job, Sokka. They get paid to do that.”

“So you’ve never actually had to clean anything before. Including your own laundry.”

“It’s unbecoming of royalty to dirty their hands with menial tasks.”

If Sokka were a firebender, all of Ba Sing Se would have gone up in flames by now.

“Zuko, have you ever worked a day in your life?”

Zuko stared, brows furrowed. In the filtered light of the bedroom, his eyes were dark comets, half-hidden behind his glasses. “Sokka, I’m the Fire Lord. You think that’s a hobby?”

“Okay, fair. But I mean, like, an honest day’s work,” Sokka said, only half-joking.

The creases streaking Zuko’s forehead deepened, and Sokka watched a vein form slowly against the pale skin. “Are you trying to start an international incident?” 

Sokka paused. What felt at first like a semi-casual conversation had suddenly become a lot more dangerous, like traversing a narrow cliffside trail by waxing moonlight. He took a breath and forged on. “I mean physical labor, not sitting on a throne listening to people argue. Not counting the tea shop. That’s the service industry, which is different. Still hard. Just different.”

Zuko didn’t fight him on it. “I… thatched a roof, once?”

“Really?”

“Not very well.”

“You were on the run for a while, weren’t you? You must have done something to make money.”

Zuko paused. “I,” he started, then shut his mouth abruptly.

“Spit it out.”

“I mugged people.”

Sokka barked a single laugh; the sound tasted like bitter almonds. “The Fire Lord held people up at knifepoint?"

“I wasn’t the Fire Lord back then.”

“The future Fire Lord, then. The future Fire Lord himself stole from Earth Kingdom civilians?” Zuko blanched. Sokka opened his mouth to make another witty comment, then realized his mistake. Zuko’s family, and by extension his whole country, had been taking resources from the Earth Kingdom for three-and-a-half generations. “Well, I guess you just went and cut out the middlemen, huh? Taking money directly from people instead of letting your soldiers do the dirty work.”

Zuko glowered at him. “I did my best to take from undesirables!”

Something about the way he said it — “undesirables”, like stealing and plundering was okay as long as the victims met some arbitrary criteria — stomped violently on a deep ache inside Sokka that he didn’t even know he had. He felt, suddenly, as if he and Zuko were standing on the edges of opposing cliffs, yelling at each other as the gulf between them got wider. Like Avatar Kyoshi and Chin the Conqueror. Sokka was afraid to discover who was who in this situation.

“Zuko, that’s the whole fucking problem!” 

His voice was louder than he meant it to be, and Zuko’s face hardened instantly.

“You can’t just decide what “undesirable” means on your own. What, were the people you stole from nasty-looking thugs? Dirty peasants that got in your way? Am I an undesirable?”

The silence between them stretched like a chain, cumbersome and heavy. Zuko’s cheeks reddened quickly, deepening from a light pink to a full-blown crimson. Strangely, the color seemed to drain from his scar, fading the red disfiguration even as the rest of his face bloomed like a peony. Zuko bit down on his lower lip. 

Sokka opened his mouth to apologize, but Zuko beat him to it. “You’re not an undesirable. Sokka — you could never be an undesirable.”

The expression on Zuko’s face was one that he hadn’t seen before, and Sokka found that he couldn’t read it. 

“No, Zuko. I _am_ an undesirable. I spent the last three months getting drunk and contributing absolutely nothing to society. If your seventeen year old self had met me on the street, he would have had absolutely no problems robbing me and leaving me to die in the middle of the desert.”

Then Sokka did a cruel thing, one that he would regret for the rest of his life. He scrunched up one side of his face, squinting his eye in a mocking imitation of Zuko’s scar. “This man is a drunkard and, judging by his dirty appearance and alcoholic atmosphere, probably a vagabond. If anyone deserves to redeem himself by assisting a royal prince with a destiny, it’s him. Thank you for your service, peasant.” 

He slashed at his own throat with his hand, and Zuko reeled back as if he had been struck.

The silence was incomprehensibly, unbelievably loud, like someone dropped the chain on the floor. They stood there, staring at each other and breathing shakily in the stillness of early morning. The sun’s rays had climbed through the horizon to reach Zuko’s windows, casting the carved shadows of the crisscrossing window frame onto the floor.

Sokka spoke first. “I’m sorry. You were doing the best you could in a bad situation. I shouldn’t have pushed you like that.”

Zuko sighed and lifted his glasses off his nose with one hand, pressing into the ridge of his unmarred eye with the thumb of his other hand. “No, I know things have been hard on you, and it’s true that I did a lot of things that I regret now.” 

They stood there for a moment. Sokka’s eyes flicked around the room, from the top frame of Zuko’s glasses to the crumpled bed sheets to the intricate wooden gridwork of the window and back to Zuko’s glasses again. It wasn’t an apology, but he didn’t expect to receive one, either. Fire Lords were probably biologically incapable of apologies, and Sokka was the one who had been cruel. 

Even if he had been right.

He settled on humor to break the silence. “So,” he said. He sidled up to Zuko and put on his best smug face. He poked at his friend’s shoulder. The air between them was still heavy and dark, but Sokka would rather drown himself in a pool of Appa’s piss than leave the situation without defusing it. “You think I’m desirable?”

Zuko placed the glasses back over his nose. The low afternoon sun glanced off the lenses in slices of white. Sokka couldn’t see his eyes very well behind the reflected glare, but he could still make out Zuko's glowering eyes. 

“You know what I meant.”

“Yeah. Though I am also _very_ sexy.” Sokka forced a laugh. 

He didn’t expect to see Zuko shrug, or to see the slight smile that quirked his lips up. 

“Now that we’ve established your eligibility as an object of attraction and properly stroked your ego, I’m going to figure out what to do about these clothes.” Zuko bent awkwardly to grab the dirty laundry. The bundle shifted as he hoisted the box into the air, and Sokka watched as the top piece of fabric unrolled and a white slip of silky material puddled shamefully on the ground. He reached down to grab it automatically and set it on top of the pile, right under Zuko’s chin.

Zuko sputters, face reddening. “That’s my—”

Sokka hadn’t spared any thoughts for what he'd just touched, but now he gave it his full attention. It was a pair of thin, short pants: the same Fire Nation undergarments he’d hastily rolled into the robe at the top. “It’s cool, it’s cool. It’s uh. Not the first pair of men’s underwear I’ve seen. Or touched. I’ve touched Aang’s before. And let me tell you, Air Nation clothes are really something.”

Zuko’s scar was becoming the palest patch of color on his face. “I’m—” he stuttered, strangled, face a shade of carnelian red, “— I’m going to go now.” He started towards the hallway.

“Let me help. You’ve never done it before.” Sokka said, closing Zuko’s door behind him and carefully ignoring the top of his pile.

“That’s not your job. You’re not a servant.”

Sokka’s grin, though small, turned genuine. He shrugged. “I’m not. But I’m your friend, and I want to help.”

欲渡黄河冰塞川，将登太行雪满山。

They sat under Iroh’s gourd-laden pergola in the back courtyard, catching the last waning rays of summer and sipping at cups of iced tea (“Iced tea isn’t _real_ tea, Sokka.” “Let me get you some hot tea then.” “Keep your hands off my cup!” “Then shut up and enjoy your drink, Sir Firelord.”). Sokka held his hand up to the light and wondered if Zuko’s hands were also shriveled-looking and pruney in that strange, tingly sort of way.

The wooden tubs in the side of the building were full of a brownish-gray murky water left over from scrubbing all the blood, sweat, and grime out of Zuko’s wardrobe. Neither of them particularly wanted to get up and dump the water out or rinse the tubs clean, so they sat in a companionable silence.

Sokka brought his hand to his nose for another sniff of Iroh’s washing powder. It was nicer than anything he’d ever used, its fragrance mild and faintly floral. Certainly nicer than the little tin of smoky ash that he used during his travels when he bothered to do his own laundry. Sokka was a hypocrite, but Zuko didn’t have to know. The standards for travelers and the undercover Fire Lords were different, anyways.

“I’ve got the medallions with me,” Zuko said suddenly, setting his cup aside and digging through his robe. “Should we take a look at them while the lighting’s still good?”

He laid the medallions between them on the bench. The token that Zuko had purchased from the street peddler rested on top of its cloth wrapping, tassel splayed limply across the table. The medallions they’d looted were arranged in a line a handspan away. All of the discs were cast from a duller metal that had begun to tarnish, and each medallion was scratched and scuffed in places. They had been beautifully stamped, but they were noticeably of a lower quality when compared to the genuine article Sokka had seen in June’s hands. 

Sokka sorted through them, searching for the stamped names hidden in the plum branches. Two of them were exact replicas of June’s token, the character of her name hidden in the lower right section of the disc. Two of the tokens bore the characters for “sandalwood” and “pine”, and the last one had a character that Sokka was entirely unfamiliar with.

“Zuko, do you know what this one says?”

Zuko looked over at the medallion. The character was hidden under one of the sparrow’s wings.

“I’m not sure,” he frowned. “We don’t use that one in the Fire Nation. If I have to guess, it’s probably a character the Earth Kingdom only uses for names.”

Sokka nodded. It made sense. They looked over the items in silence, and then Sokka was struck with a sudden thought. “How come I didn’t get a fancy passport?”

“I wasn’t aware that you wanted one. You were traveling with Aang for a while, which is honestly better than showing identification. And Suki told me that she was planning to stay in Kyoshi Island for the long haul, so I figured you would go with her and not really need it.”

“But I’m better friends with you than June is, right? Friendship has to count for something.”

“Sokka, that’s favoritism.”

“Yeah, but June’s a bounty hunter! An international security risk! She could take a bounty on your head and use the token you gave her to collect your head!” A ridiculous thought crossed Sokka’s mind, and his mouth was parroting the words before he could really consider them. “You just thought she was pretty and wanted to impress her!”

“It was strictly professional,” Zuko protested, but he was blushing in an extremely unflattering manner, a deep redness exploding over his entire face. 

Sokka felt his jaw loosen a little. He’d truly meant it as a joke, but Zuko’s reaction… 

Honestly, it made sense. June and Mai were two extremely threatening, lethal women cut from the same cloth. Mai was a little stuffier and maybe had slightly more scruples, but they were both the dark type that wouldn’t hesitate to cut you down if you so much as sneezed in their direction.

How the hell did June manage to attract a solid half of Team Avatar? Next he’d find out that Toph thought June had a smoking hot voice. Though she really did, and it wouldn’t surprise him if Toph did feel that way.

 _Please,_ he begged the spirits. _Just keep Aang out of this_. Sokka didn’t think he could handle it if it turned out the Avatar, the paragon of pacifism, had also crushed on a man-eating, booze-guzzling sellsword. It would also put his reaction to Katara’s eyeliner phase in an entirely different light, and Sokka fervently did not want to consider that for even one more second.

Zuko saved him from his rapidly escalating thoughts by coughing. “Anyway. Let’s get back to business.” He turned his face downwards, shading his pink cheeks with the escaped strands of his hair.

Sokka followed his gaze. “What should we do with these?”

“Toph helped Kuei cast these,” Zuko said. “Or at least, she created the original molds and formulated the metal. These are clearly counterfeit, but the casts look identical.”

“Toph did?”

“In return for funding one of her schools.”

Ah. It made sense. The only thing Toph liked better than wanton destruction of property was performing minor acts of earthbending for astronomical prices.

“They’re only good for the Earth Kingdom, which is why June has one for the Fire Nation as well. The molds for these should be stored in some secret location that only the King knows.”

“But Kuei can’t keep a secret for his life.”

“I didn’t know that,” Zuko said. “He was the one who brought the system up to me. He was very enthusiastic about it.”

“Exactly.”

Zuko sighed. “You’re right. I’ll write both of them and see what they say.” 

He swept the medallions back into their pouch, then pulled the scroll out and unrolled it. Careful to avoid the rings of condensation from their tea, he set it down between them. He read the last two lines out loud:

“ _Yearning yellows the falling leaves. White dewdrops on green moss —_ do you think this poem is some kind of code?” 

“No, definitely not.” 

Sokka’s words were utterly wrong in Zuko’s mouth, like a cool breeze riding his raspy voice. In Sokka’s brain, the lines had been full of sorrow and loss. Zuko’s voice mellowed the words out, imbuing them with a quiet, tranquil kind of acceptance. His poem sounded infinitely better coming from Zuko, and Sokka decided he hated it.

“How can you be so sure?”

“Because I wrote it. About Suki.”

The sun shone exuberantly through the latticed roof, casting leaf-dappled sunbeams over the bench and speckling light across Zuko’s face. 

“Oh,” Zuko said. “It’s very beautiful. What was it doing on him?”

“The assassin? I have no idea.”

“Okay,” Zuko said. “We don’t know if he really was an assassin, though. Let’s not jump to conclusions.”

“Come on, he was totally an assassin. You’re the Fire Lord. Tons of people here want you dead, no offense."

“Look, they had no way of knowing who I was. It was dark, and again, who would believe that the Fire Lord was at a peasant festival?”

Sokka’s lips tightened. Anyone with eyes could see that the Lower Ring was a poor neighborhood, but the way Zuko said it so matter-of-factly rekindled Sokka’s anger from earlier in the day. 

He looked away. They’d managed an uneasy truce, and he wasn’t ready to shatter that peace yet. Zuko had just been born lucky and didn’t realize what he was saying. If the spirits hadn’t smiled on him when he was born, he could have ended up just another peasant. But the world _was_ unfair, and there was no point in Sokka getting angry over the fact that the spirits would always love Zuko more, the beautiful ruler, the prince who had regained his honour by pushing through fire and lightning.

Zuko’s freshly washed clothes swayed with the twilight wind, hung on rows of twine strung between Iroh’s roof and his mulberry tree. Sokka watched the fabrics billow in the breeze, flicking droplets of water onto the bricks of the courtyard. The ice cubes in his glass shifted, and a sudden thought occurred to him. “Who did your laundry during the time you lived here? When you guys were working at the old tea shop. And what about when you were chasing us on your ship?”

Zuko topped up the cup in Sokka’s hand before Sokka even realized it was empty. “We had crewmembers do the laundry on the ship. And Uncle took care of everything while we were here.”

Sokka stopped mid-sip. “You made the _Dragon of the West_ wash your dirty underwear?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The new characters stamped on the medallions are “郝” (hǎo, a character used only in names), “松” (sōng, pine tree), and “枋” (fāng, sandalwood tree).
> 
> The line in this chapter is from Li Bai’s 行路难三首, “The Hard Road (three poems)". Here's a rough translation:  
> I wanted to cross the Yellow River but it was brimming with ice  
> I was about to climb the Taihang Mountains but they overflowed with snow
> 
> * * *
> 
> A huge thank you to chuffystilton for beta reading! Check out her fic [Through the Ice Darkly](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26913250), a subversive AU with incredible prose.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As always, translations at the bottom of the chapter.

From just inside the gate of the Five-Seven-Five Society, a persimmon tree stretched two heavy, fruit-laden branches across the wall and into the street. 

Sokka glanced up. The closest branch dipped right above his head and dangled a single fruit: perfectly round, soft orange and covered by a dull white bloom of dust, taunting him. If Sokka could just reach the damn persimmon, he might die a happy man. He could already taste its bright sweetness, like autumn sunshine in his mouth.

He weighed the possibilities in his head. He could try jumping to grab it or using his boomerang to knock the fruit loose, but both options carried the risk of bruising the soft flesh. He could also just… give up. Be a decent human being and not steal fruit from little poet-girls. He paced outside the gate, a quick back-and-forth, muttering under his breath and weighing the pros and cons of petty theft. Was it really petty theft, if the branch extended into a public street? If only Zuko were here. If he had an accomplice, Zuko could boost him on his shoulders and they would be out of this street in less than the time it took a baby to take a piss in the street. And Sokka would get to brag that he had ridden the Fire Lord like a common mule.

Sokka wasn’t sure how he’d ended up outside the school gates, other than as an attempt to escape the comfortable nest of the little house and the tea shop. Walking around and gawking at the opulence of the Upper Ring beat moping around at the tea shop all day, or puttering around in the garden while Zuko was at work. He’d already carved little cartoon versions of Zuko and Iroh on half of the hulu fruits in the garden.

Sokka didn’t want to admit that he was getting comfortable in Ba Sing Se, in Iroh’s little home. He’d carved out a tentative but steady peace with Zuko since their argument, and living with him was more comfortable than he would have ever imagined. Functionally, his life wasn’t really any different from how it had been on Kyoshi Island, except now he was mooching off the Fire Lord instead of his warrior girlfriend. He’d sworn to himself, after the breakup, that he would be his own person again. How could he do that if he was living off the grace and goodwill of an old friend?

On second thought, the Fire Nation had enacted so many atrocities on his people, the least they could do was support him while he was getting over a dramatic breakup.

Behind him, the gates swung open, sudden and silent on completely oiled hinges. A woman stood, posture haughty and unfriendly. Everything about her was forbiddingly thin: eyes, nose, lips, hair.

“You,” she said, glaring at him. “Vagabond. What are you doing outside our school?”

Sokka froze. It was Macmu-Ling. Her eyes had acquired a few more wrinkles; her cheeks had begun to sag a little with age, but she was every bit as severe as he remembered. The only difference was that he’d gained almost a head’s worth of height on her, and looking down at her gave him the overall impression of staring down an angry fire ferret.

“Uh,” he said, mind scrambling for an appropriate response. _I was admiring your beautiful… mortar… wall? I was wondering if I could get away with theft? I got lost?_

“I was hoping you would accept a student?”

“Back straight,” the master said, and Sokka felt the disks in his spine arrange themselves in single file. She walked a circle around him, a weasel-snake stalking a boar. She _tsk_ -ed loudly.

“You may come in,” she said. “It is unusual for us to accept male students, especially one as… old as you, but I received a minor prophecy last month that pointed to this day. I will give you one chance to prove yourself in front of my students.”

She turned on her heel and marched into the building, Sokka trailing behind her like a prisoner. The front doors opened into a main auditorium, exactly the same as he remembered it, with figures seated elegantly upon rows of cushions in front of a large raised platform. Twenty teenage female faces swiveled to meet his movements as he entered. The girls, all dressed in the stuffy jade-toned robes and headpieces of Ba Sing Se’s upper crust, blinked at him in unison. Like one big, multi-eyed organism.

Macmu-Ling led him to the stage and ascended the steps, positioning Sokka in the very center under the lights. He looked out at the crowd and the forty unblinking owl eyes staring back at him and felt his pores begin to produce panicked sweat under the fabric of his tunic.

“Now introduce yourself to the class.”

“Hello,” he said, bowing. “I am Sokka of the Water Tribe.”

The class tittered, the girls leaning towards each other and using the whisper-soft susurration of their sleeves to dampen their murmuring.

“And what will you share with us today, Sokka of the Water Tribe?”

Years ago, he’d stumbled his way through a handful of haikus, but as an adult Sokka couldn’t quite remember the rules. To be honest, he wasn’t really sure what he was doing even back then. He’d have to take a chance on a new poem, one that had been pupating in his mind for a few days but hadn’t yet emerged from its chrysalis.

抽刀断水水更流，

举杯消愁愁更愁。

人生在世不称意，

明朝散发弄扁舟。

There was a silence, then laughter from a single girl sitting in the front row. She was pale as milk, with pink lips and long lashes. “That’s not a haiku. We’re the Five-Seven-Five Society, not the Seven-Seven-Seven-Seven Society.”

Sokka said nothing. His veins trembled against his skin.

“I’ll admit that it’s good, but you can’t possibly expect us to believe that you wrote that. You look like you can barely speak the common tongue.”

“He’s talking about being a drunkard,” another girl snickered. This girl was small and mean-looking, with a certain slant to her eyes that reminded him of Zuko’s murderous little sister. The ornaments on her headdress swayed in time with her mocking laughter. “That’s hardly an appropriate topic for poetry.”

“Maybe he did write it. Who else would talk about getting drunk so proudly?”

“Enough,” said Macmu-Ling. “Lian, An, Yuxin, I expect a poem of apology from each of you delivered to your classmate tomorrow morning.”

The base of Sokka’s ribcage melted like wax under a flame; his heart dropped into his stomach. Classmate? He thought that Macmu-Ling would have called his bluff, and he was even more surprised that he had actually won her approval. Muffled confusion diffused through the classroom, the girls shuffling in their kneeling positions as they cast glances at one another. The three girls who had laughed set their eyes on him again, more baleful than before. 

“Now, I must discuss matters with our newest pupil. Sokka, if you would come with me. The rest of you, I expect to see three new haikus in our next session.”

Air bruised its way back into Sokka’s lungs, and he followed Macmu-Ling out of the room. When they reached Macmu-Ling’s office, she motioned for him to shut the door. It closed with a clunk, muffling the shuffling in the hall.

“Sokka of the Water Tribe,” she said, and eyed him with a strange gaze. He’d introduced himself with exactly those words, but now the title sent shame quivering through him.

“That’s me.” 

He sat in the chair opposite her, looking her in the eye. He’d be damned if he showed weakness here. Macmu-Ling’s eyebrows were thin and tapered off into sharp little points, giving her the air of a predator.

“You came to our school once, almost a decade ago.” It wasn’t a question.

“I did.”

“At the time, though it pains me to admit it, you showed an unusual grasp of the mechanics of poetry for one so unlearned. And now you have returned to us with a new style.”

He shrugged, projecting confidence in the easy roll of his shoulders. Back then, he had been a teenager with an extreme lack of self-awareness and an entire audience of young women to impress. As an adult, Sokka felt much more cautious. Rationally speaking, he had nothing to lose. But now some small creature in his heart curled up and trembled at the thought of being judged and deemed inadequate.

“I have here a note from Iroh of the Jasmine Dragon, formerly of the Fire Nation. He praised your poetry.”

Sokka stared, all pretenses of ease abandoned. Iroh thought his poetry was good? 

“How do you know Iroh?”

“Our pupils enjoy spending time at the Jasmine Dragon. It is a beautiful venue overflowing with artistic inspiration.” Macmu-Ling said. She leaned back into her chair and looked at him with a steely gaze. The early autumn light streaming through the window behind them flung her shadow across the table between them, and the strange shape of her headdress against the wood of the desk coagulated into a blooming flower, the tips of its petals pointing mockingly at him. “More importantly, we run in the same circles. Have you heard of the White Lotus?”

弃我去者，昨日之日不可留；乱我心者，今日之日多烦忧。

“Zuko,” Sokka yelled, kicking his shoes off at the entrance to the house and bursting through the hallways, ducking his head through each open doorway. “Zuko. You will not believe this.”

He found Zuko sitting at the kitchen table with a bamboo steamer of takeout dumplings. In the two weeks that Sokka had bummed around the Jasmine Dragon, he hadn’t seen Zuko use the stove (or any culinary firebending) once except to cobble together a truly horrible soupy concoction of underdone rice, jarred pickles, and shrimp salt in the middle of the night. Sokka had snuck a bite and then dashed out into the garden to retch. Zuko had picked up his bowl and followed him out into the garden, cool as a cat, the ceramic spoon unerringly ferrying the poison sludge into his mouth as he watched Sokka empty his stomach behind an osmanthus bush.

Was the Fire Lord all right? Sokka suspected that Fire Nation dissidents were wasting their time and resources trying to assassinate him. All they really had to do was wait for Zuko to die of food poisoning or malnourishment. He stood in the doorway, studying Zuko for any signs of illness. Didn’t they say that depressed people lost their sense of taste? Maybe that was why Zuko could eat three bowls of that repulsive muck without a single complaint.

Except… Zuko was the picture of health. His hair was smooth and glossy as a magpie’s feathers, and his skin was smooth and almost poreless. His biceps were still enviably defined, and Sokka stole a quick glance at his thighs. Even under multiple layers of fabric, Sokka could tell that they were muscled and firm. His eyes flicked back to Zuko’s face. The same late-morning light that had cast Macmu-Ling into a tiny statue of forbidding sternness softened the hard edges of his jawline and blurred the ridges of scar tissue over his left eye.

Zuko’s scar reminded Sokka of a sandy shoreline, transforming under the gentle touch of wind and tide. Constantly remaking itself so slowly that Sokka couldn’t see the action any more, only the result.

Zuko’s chopsticks paused in their journey to his open mouth, then retreated as he noticed Sokka staring. “What is it?” 

He set the dumpling down gently and rested the chopsticks neatly across the rim of the steamer.

“There’s a poetry society on the south side of the Upper Ring, and the master of the school knows your uncle!”

“Madame Macmu-Ling?” Zuko asked. He stretched his feet under the table and picked the chopsticks back up. “I’m going to keep eating. I have to get back to the shop in twenty minutes.”

“Do you know her?” Sokka took a seat at the table, resting his head on one propped hand and tracing the grain of the wooden surface with the other hand.

“She sends a scroll of poetry to Uncle every month, and her students come here all the time. I think she’s one of Uncle’s ex-girlfriends, actually.”

Now that was an exhilarating and terrifying thought. How did Iroh manage to see beauty in everyone? More importantly, what the hell did the uptight, haughty Macmu-Ling see in Iroh?

“Isn’t she like half his age? Wait, that’s not important. Though it is extremely interesting.” Sokka’s hand darted out, quick as a kingfisher’s beak, but Zuko slid the entire basket down the table and away from him. “Macmu-Ling’s part of the White Lotus!”

“Where do you think she and Uncle met?” Zuko nudged at the little saucer of soy sauce and rice vinegar, maneuvering it between the steamer basket and his body. He lowered a dumpling by its pleated ridge, dipping it into the sauce. The skin of the dumpling was almost translucent, and Sokka could see the shape of the filling inside. He felt the saliva pool in his mouth as he watched the sauce drip off the dumpling’s thin skin. 

“I didn’t know they allowed women in. And are those shrimp and moo-sow?”

Zuko nodded, chewing on his dumpling and swallowing before speaking again. “I don’t think they’re given leadership positions, but there are plenty of women on the lower tiers.”

“That’s messed up. Can I have one?” 

“Go ahead.” Zuko pushed the steamer back towards Sokka, leaving it on the table between them. “And I know. Take it up with Uncle.”

Sokka reached towards the dumplings again, eyes lighting up.

“Use some utensils,” Zuko said, batting Sokka’s fingers away with his free hand. “You haven’t even washed your hands yet.”

Sokka groaned. What was wrong with eating a little invisible dirt? Dirt was edible, unlike Zuko’s nightmare cooking. “But my hands are just going to get dirty again. I’m going out into the city after this.”

“Where are you going?” Zuko asked, pulling the steamer back towards him and lifting another dumpling out delicately. It hung tantalizingly from his chopsticks, close enough to Sokka’s face that he could almost smell it.

Sokka leaned over the table and propped his head up on his hands, frowning intensely at the dumpling. “Macmu-Ling told me she heard about some people sneaking around the Middle Ring disseminating shady literature. Asked me to help her check it out. Basically inducted me into her little group of White Lotus henchmen. Or henchgirls, if you would. I’m meeting one of them at a bookstore in a few hours.”

“Hm.” Zuko dipped the dumpling in the saucer. The sauce clung to the folds of the wrapper, and Sokka’s eyes tracked a droplet as it slid from a fold and along the pillowy curve of the dumpling. 

“She has like thirty rich teenage girls at her school, right? Half of them are basically fully-fledged White Lotus operatives!”

Zuko raised both eyebrows in surprise. “Huh. I guess it makes sense. They come to the shop all the time.” Zuko looked up at him, holding a cupped hand underneath the dumpling. 

“They order a lot of bubble tea. At least four of Uncle’s special blends are named after them.”

Suddenly, the dumpling was under Sokka’s nose, Zuko’s hand hovering under his chin to catch any drips. Sokka’s eyes jerked up to meet Zuko’s. The corners of his eyes were crinkled, and Sokka noticed for the first time that Zuko’s eyebrows tilted slightly upwards when he smiled.

Sokka was not about to look a gift ostrich-horse in the muzzle, even if said ostrich-horse had a surprisingly cute face. He opened his mouth, ripped the dumpling off the chopsticks with his teeth, and leaned back far enough that the food was secure even if Zuko changed his mind. He closed his eyes as the tangy sauce hit his tongue and the dumpling wrapper tore in his mouth.

Zuko frowned, then retracted the chopsticks and continued eating. “Feeding you is like feeding a rabid eelhound.” 

“No takebacks,” Sokka said, covering his mouth with one hand and pushing the words out through the gob of half-chewed shrimp and moo-sow. “Can I have another one?”

Zuko sighed, but fed him another dumpling anyways, grimacing as a dribble of vinegar escaped the corner of Sokka’s mouth. “Are you all right?”

Sokka swallowed. “What do you mean?”

“You seem on edge, somehow. Did something happen at the Five-Seven-Five Society?”

Sokka had been a guest at the Jasmine Dragon for just over a fortnight; it was scary how fast Zuko managed to pick up on his emotions. 

“Oh. You know, same old.”

“What do you mean?”

“The students at the society didn’t believe I wrote my own poetry.”

“But—” Zuko paused, truly confused. “Why not?”

How could Sokka explain the feeling of being a stranger everywhere he went? Too dark to pass as an Earth citizen, too removed from the traditions of the Southern Water Tribe to be a true Tribesman. Every time he visited, the men of his tribe would ruffle his hair and crack jokes about his foreigner’s accent and his pititful vocabulary.

Sometimes, he dreamed of losing the words of his mother tongue. In those dreams, he was always a young boy, watching the men of his tribe raise their ships’ sails, his father bending down to cup his face in both hands – the traditional goodbye in the language of the water. When it was Sokka’s turn, he opened his mouth to trace the first shape of the sound with his tongue, and the words of farewell dropped from his lips like old scabs. Each time, he looked down at the ground and watched as the words took shape, wriggling away from him like deformed, glistening black worms in the snow. 

While his father turned away in silence, Sokka scrabbled through the snow with his bare hands, scooping the words up and swallowing them, choking on the fat, slimy bitterness that fought to escape his throat. The dream always ended with Sokka digging through the snow for the worms until his fingers froze into place and the worms disappeared into the thick ice of the tundra. 

He would jolt awake, gasping and crying, and leave the bed he shared with Suki before she could stir. 

It was shameful to admit, but on those nights, Sokka never resented Yue more. As he fought to calm his breathing, Yue gazed at him from her throne in the sky, a mute observer shining silently above him, ignoring his desperate pleas for guidance and the ancestral memory of his mother tongue. Under the moon’s quiet light, he would run through every word he knew, tallying them on a spare piece of paper. It would take hours for him to calm down enough to fall asleep with his back leaned against their front door, lulled by the familiar taste of the words in his mouth and the ghostly sound of waves crashing against ice.

... and now Sokka was a poet who composed exclusively in the common tongue, forgetting more of his father’s language with every line. He was an artist in a language that would never view him as legitimate, and what did he have to show for it?

“Zuko,” he settled on saying. “Just look at me.”

“Oh.”

The saucer of vinegar soured the air with its pungency. Zuko was the Fire Lord; of course he wouldn’t get it.

Then, suddenly, Sokka felt a soft, heavy warmth on his hand. Zuko’s palm rested on the back of his hand, his fingers curled gently over Sokka’s own. 

“ _White dewdrops on green moss,_ ” Zuko said, his lips curving around that fragment of Sokka’s poem. “Of course you write your own poetry. Who else could?”

Those narrow, mismatched eyes — they were steady and warmer than wine, with no trace of condescension. For the second time that day, Sokka found himself breathless.

俱怀逸兴壮思飞，欲上青天览明月。

Macmu-Ling had arranged for Sokka to meet his mystery classmate at the Old Boat Bookstore in the Middle Ring. He arrived a few minutes early and began to comb through the poetry section, searching for the telltale blue backing of plagiarism.

While half his mind was occupied with his task, another part of it was thinking about Zuko. 

Zuko was surprisingly good-looking, though Sokka thought that maybe he was the only one who saw it. Maybe Mai had broken things off with Zuko because she got tired of looking at his face. Sokka couldn’t blame her for that. He suspected that years of evil had caused the Fire Nation royal line to develop an unfortunate combination of facial features. In an ironic twist of fate, Azula had managed to escape most of those genes, inheriting the placid softness of her mother’s face, but Zuko had gotten his father’s harsh jawline and disdainful eyes. But although he wasn’t conventionally attractive by any stretch, and Sokka had heard his fair share of horrified gossip about the disfigured Fire Lord during his travels through the Earth Kingdom, there was something about the tilt of Zuko’s cheekbone, and the color of his eyes, that looked… nice, under the right lighting.

There was something about Zuko that was oddly appealing.

“Sokka, right?” He shrieked and the half-unfurled scroll tumbled from his grasp, the table punching a deep crescent-moon crease into the paper. Two steady, callused hands plucked the scroll and quickly rerolled it, fastening the ties and slotting it back onto its shelf.

His eyes climbed the trail of those hands to find a large bulldog of a girl, built more for underground bending matches than the tiny cushions of the Five-Seven-Five Society. The girl’s eyes were round as the mouth of a well, her irises a perfect earthy brown. Sokka’s gaze flickered to her tiny nose and her even tinier mouth. The overall effect of her combined features was that he was looking at her through some kind of fisheye glass.

“I’m Yin!” The stranger said, winding her arm through the crook of Sokka’s elbow. “You’re cuter than I expected!”

Yin reminded him of young Ty Lee, if Ty Lee were as solid as a gemsbok bull. They both carried themselves with the same air of chirpy innocence. Yin didn’t look like one of Macmu-Ling’s normal students, but then again, neither did Sokka.

“Nice to meet you, uh, Yin. I didn’t see you at the school earlier.” 

“I’m an afternoon student only, since I’m on scholarship! My parents are farmers way down south, so I’ve got a job in order to make rent. But I like my job, so it’s all good!”

Sokka nodded. Yin’s mouth seemed to move faster than a polar bear-dog after its prey, and if he weren’t paying attention, he would have written her off as a flighty teenager. But her sharp eyes and firm gaze told a different story.

“Anyway, Macmu-Ling’s really nice. She helps me when she can. Gives me little jobs to make some extra cash, sends any job posting my way, things like that.” Yin laughed, then tugged on Sokka’s elbow, words fizzing giddily from her lips like foam from an over-fermented crock of pickles. “She told me there was some foreigner who came by to ask about poetry, and she figured I could come show you around the bookstores. Give you recommendations, keep you out of trouble, you know. Rent’s coming up soon, so I could really use the money!”

“I’ll cover dinner, too,” Sokka said. Restaurants in the Middle Ring weren’t cheap, but Yue would probably haunt his dreams for the next six months if he didn’t pay for a young student’s dinner. “It’s the least I could do. Do you know the bookstores around here well?”

Yin nodded. “I work for one of the couriers in the Middle Ring, and she always lets me do the book shipments. But The Old Boat’s the best for sure. _Everyone_ comes here. What are you looking for?”

Sokka frowned. “I’m not sure, actually. What kinds of books do you recommend?”

How much did Yin know? Macmu-Ling had mentioned that she was sending a trusted student, but Yin was just so… cheery and oblivious that he couldn’t imagine her sent on a top-secret mission to root out agitators. He’d have to play his cards carefully here.

Ying pulled him along to a separate shelf. “Right now, history books are pretty popular,” she said, “since the war is over and all. People are publishing war memoirs left and right. There’s a pretty interesting one about a waterbender who escaped the Fire Nation.” She gestured to a wall crammed from floor to ceiling with dusty tomes. “Or we could look at the philosophy section! A lot of scholars have been publishing little treatises on politics and the role of government.”

That seemed promising. Sokka turned the corner into the philosophy section and selected a thin book at random. “ _The Role of the Spirits in Modern Times._ ” It was a flimsy thing, bound with paper so cheap that the ink bled through both sides of the paper. The type was printed using one of those modern presses that compressed some of the characters into blocks so dense that they were barely decipherable. Sokka didn’t think that it looked like the type of book used to indoctrinate readers with anti-peace propaganda, but he’d also be the first to admit that they were flying in the dark. Either way, it wouldn’t hurt to look through it.

Yin pulled him out of the way of a passing scholar, positioning them so that their backs were to the shelf of books. The man stopped next to them, craning his head to look at the stacks above him. 

“I heard about your poem,” she said to Sokka. “Macmu-Ling recited it to me. I thought it was very good.”

Sokka grunted, flipping through the pages. The book, or what was legible of it, seemed to be mostly a call to reject spirituality and embrace the modern era of machinery. He rifled through the pages, running his thumb along the outer edge of the book and relishing the feeling of the paper fanning against his finger. The smooth roll of the paper stuck for a moment, and Sokka frowned. A moment later, a thick card slipped out of the pages and floated softly to the ground.

Yin released her grip on his elbow immediately, ducking down to pick the card up. She held it up between them, and Sokka barely had the time to make out a few characters before she tucked it into her sleeve, quick as a flash: _The Avatar and the illegitimate Fire Lord have ushered in an era of false peace —_

The bookstore was silent save for the shuffling of pages and restless feet. Sokka looked up, scanning the aisle for any suspicious movements, and made eye contact with the middle-aged scholar who had stopped next to them. The man was innocent-looking enough in clean green robes and his dark hair tucked away in a scholar’s hat. His eyes flicked to the book in Sokka’s hand, then back up to his face. There was a brief glint of something odd in the scholar’s gaze as his lips curved into a gentle smile.

Yin snaked her arm through his elbow again, then squeezed his forearm in a staccato rhythm. 

“Let’s just buy that,” she said, pulling Sokka towards the counter at the entrance of the store. “I’m a little thirsty. You can keep reading it at a cafe.”

The scholar was still looking at them. Sokka smiled at the man and nodded once as he turned back to Yin.

长风万里送秋雁，对此可以酣高楼。

The shoddy excuse for a book cost twenty copper pieces, and Sokka could tell from the clientele that The Old Boat wasn’t a haggling kind of establishment. Sokka fumed silently as he counted his coins out one by one; he could buy two whole steamer baskets of pork buns at Auntie Ba’s for twenty coppers. As Yin dragged him out into the crisp afternoon sunshine, leaving the store behind, he did a bit of mental math. Treating her to a multi-dish meal was probably out of the picture now, but he could still manage to feed her at one of the cheaper noodle bars near the University. Would the White Lotus consider the book a business expense?

“I know a great cafe,” Yin said as they turned down a thoroughfare, dodging rickety ox-goat carts and erratic pedestrians, arms twined all the while. “The Jasmine Dragon. Have you heard of it? Members of the Five-Seven-Five Society get a fifteen percent student discount!” 

Sokka didn’t mention that for a war hero, plus a friend of the Fire Lord, or at least his moochy roommate – it was a one hundred percent discount. Instead, he just said, “Sure,” as she steered him in the direction of the monorail station.

Of course she’d pick the Dragon. Eventually, all roads led to the Jasmine Dragon.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The lines in this chapter are taken from Li Bai’s 宣州谢朓楼饯别校书叔云, “Sending off Secretary Uncle Yun at Xietiao House in Xuanzhou”, which is a handful of a title, I know. In this case, “Secretary” is the title of a court official who handles organization of the court’s books, and the Secretary in question also happens to be Li Bai’s uncle.
> 
> The fragment that Sokka reads:  
> Drawing a blade to cut water only makes it flow harder,  
> Toasting with our cups to melt our worries only makes them stronger,  
> Life on this world will never be satisfactory,  
> So tomorrow I’ll leave my hair loose and drift off on my boat.
> 
> The first section break is:  
> Yesterday is gradually moving far from me, it won’t stay,  
> Today has thrown my heart into worry and disarray.
> 
> The second break is:  
> We are full of ambition,  
> Wanting to climb the blue sky to pluck the bright moon.
> 
> The third break:  
> The long wind escorts the autumn geese through their ten-thousand mile journey,  
> As I drink and watch them from this villa.
> 
> * * *
> 
> in the after days hit 100 kudos! Thank you so much for reading, commenting, and boosting. This is my first fic, and I'm so honored that you spent your time reading it.
> 
> A huge thank you to chuffystilton for beta reading!


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